1 <?xml version=
"1.0" encoding=
"utf-8"?>
2 <rss version='
2.0' xmlns:lj='http://www.livejournal.org/rss/lj/
1.0/'
>
4 <title>Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries tagged english
</title>
5 <description>Entries tagged english
</description>
6 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/
</link>
10 <title>Nikita version
0.5 released - updated free software archive API server
</title>
11 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nikita_version_0_5_released___updated_free_software_archive_API_server.html
</link>
12 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nikita_version_0_5_released___updated_free_software_archive_API_server.html
</guid>
13 <pubDate>Mon,
2 Mar
2020 19:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
14 <description><p
>Today, after many months of development, a new release of
15 <ahref=
"https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core/
">Nikita
16 Noark
5 core project
</a
> was finally
17 <ahref=
"https://lists.nuug.no/pipermail/nikita-noark/
2020-March/
000519.html
">announced
18 on the project mailing list
</a
>. The Nikita free software solution is
19 an implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark
5 used by
20 government offices in Norway. These were the changes in version
0.5
21 since version
0.4, see the email link above for links to a demo
26 <li
>Updated to Noark
5 versjon
5.0 API specification.
28 <li
>Changed formatting of _links from [] to {} to match IETF draft
29 on JSON HAL.
</li
>
30 <li
>Merged Registrering og Basisregistrering in version
4 to
31 combined Registrering.
</li
>
32 <li
>DokumentObjekt is now subtype of ArkivEnhet.
</li
>
33 <li
>Introducing new entity Arkivnotat.
</li
>
34 <li
>Changed all relation keys to use /v5/ instead of /v4/.
</li
>
35 <li
>Corrected to use new official relation keys when possible.
</li
>
36 <li
>Renamed Sakspart to Part and connect it to Mappe, Registrering
37 and Dokumentbeskrivelse instead of only Saksmappe.
</li
>
38 <li
>Moved Korrespondansepart connection from Journalpost to
39 Registrering.
</li
>
40 <li
>Moved Part and Korrespondansepart from package sakarkiv to
41 arkivstruktur.
</li
>
42 <li
>Renamed presedensstatus to presedensStatus.
</li
>
43 <li
>Use new JSON content-type
"application/vnd.noark5+json
".
</li
>
44 <li
>Updated prepopulated format list to use PRONOM codes.
</li
>
45 <li
>Implemented endpoint for system information.
</li
>
46 <li
>Implemented national identifiers for both file and record.
</li
>
47 <li
>Implemented comments.
</li
>
48 <li
>implemented sign off.
</li
>
49 <li
>implemented conversion.
</li
>
50 </ul
></li
>
51 <li
>Improved/implemented OData search and paging support for more entities.
</li
>
52 <li
>No longer exposes attribute Dokumentobjekt.referanseDokumentfil,
53 one should use the relation in _links instead.
</li
>
54 <li
>Corrected relation keys under
55 https://rel.arkivverket.no/noark5/v5/api/administrasjon/, replacing
56 'administrasjon
' with
'admin
'.
</li
>
57 <li
>Fixed several security and stability issues discovered by Coverity.
</li
>
58 <li
>Corrected handling ETag errors, now return code
409.
</li
>
59 <li
>Improved handling of Kryssreferanse.
</li
>
60 <li
>Changed internal database model to use UUID/SystemID as primary keys
62 <li
>Changed internal database table names to use package prefix.
</li
>
63 <li
>Changed time zone handling for date and datetime attributes, to be
64 more according to the new definition in the API specification.
</li
>
65 <li
>Change revoke-token to only drop token on POST requests, not GET.
</li
>
66 <li
>Updated to newer Spring version.
</li
>
67 <li
>Changed primary key and URL component for metadata code lists to
68 use the
'kode
' value instead of a SystemID.
</li
>
69 <li
>Corrected implementation of Part and Sakspart.
</li
>
70 <li
>Changed instance lists with subtypes (like .../registrering/ and
71 .../mappe/) to include the attributes and _links entries for the
72 subtype in the supertype lists.
</li
>
73 <li
>Adjusted _links relations to make it possible to figure out the
74 entity of an instance using the self-
>href-
>relation key lookup
76 <li
>Fixed several end points to make sure GET, PUT, POST and DELETE
77 match each other.
</li
>
78 <li
>Updated DELETE endpoints to work with UUID based entity
79 identifiers.
</li
>
80 <li
>Restructured code to use more common URL related constants in entry
81 point values and replace @RequestMapping with method specific
82 annotations.
</li
>
83 <li
>Added first unit test code.
</li
>
84 <li
>Updated web GUI to work with the updated API.
</li
>
85 <li
>Changed integer fields, enforce them as numeric.
</li
>
86 <li
>Rewrote and simplify metadata handling to use common service and
87 controller code instead of duplicating for each type.
</li
>
88 <li
>Implemented the remaining metadata types.
</li
>
89 <li
>Changed Country list source from Wikipedia to Debian iso-codes and
90 updated the list of Countries.
</li
>
91 <li
>Many many corrections and improvements.
</li
>
95 <p
>If free and open standardized archiving API sound interesting to
96 you, please contact us on IRC
97 (
<a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/%
23nikita
">#nikita on
98 irc.freenode.net
</a
>) or email
99 (
<a href=
"https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark
">nikita-noark
100 mailing list
</a
>).
</p
>
102 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
103 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
104 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
109 <title>Blockchain and IoT articles accepted into Records Management Journal
</title>
110 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Blockchain_and_IoT_articles_accepted_into_Records_Management_Journal.html
</link>
111 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Blockchain_and_IoT_articles_accepted_into_Records_Management_Journal.html
</guid>
112 <pubDate>Thu,
27 Feb
2020 09:
05:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
113 <description><p
>On Tuesday, two scietific articles we have been working on for a
114 while, was finally accepted for publication into
115 <a href=
"https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/issn/
0956-
5698">Records
116 Management Journal
</a
>. Still waiting for the assigned DOI urls to
117 start working, but you can have a look at the LaTeX originals here.
</p
>
119 <p
>The first article is
120 "<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2020-
02-
25-rmj-iot-record-keeping.pdf
">A
121 record-keeping approach to managing IoT-data for government
122 agencies
</a
>" (
<a href=
"https://doi.org/
10.1108/RMJ-
09-
2019-
0056">DOI
123 10.1108/RMJ-
09-
2019-
0056</a
>) by Thomas Sødring, Petter Reinholdtsen
124 and David Massey, and sketches some approaches for storing measurement
125 data (aka Internet of Things sensor data) in a archive, thus providing
126 a well defined mechanism for screening and deletion of the information
</p
>
128 <p
>The second article is
129 "<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2020-
02-
25-rmj-block-chain-record-keeping.pdf
">Publishing
130 and using record-keeping structural information in a blockchain
</a
>"
131 (
<a href=
"https://doi.org/
10.1108/RMJ-
09-
2019-
0050">DOI
132 10.1108/RMJ-
09-
2019-
0050<a/
>) by Thomas Sødring, Petter Reinholdtsen
133 and Svein Ølnes, where we describe a way for third parties to validate
134 authenticity and thus improve trust in the records kept in a
137 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
138 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
139 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
144 <title>When terms and policy turn users away
</title>
145 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/When_terms_and_policy_turn_users_away.html
</link>
146 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/When_terms_and_policy_turn_users_away.html
</guid>
147 <pubDate>Sat,
7 Dec
2019 21:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
148 <description><p
>When asked to accept terms of use and privacy policies that state
149 it will to remove rights I otherwise had or accept unreasonable terms
150 undermining my privacy, I choose away the service. I simply do not
151 have the conscience to accept terms I have no indention of upholding.
152 But how are the system and service providers to know how many people
153 they scared away? Normally I just quietly walk away. But today, I
154 tried a new approach. I sent the following email (removing the
155 specifics, as I am not out to take the specific service in question)
156 to the service provider I decided to not use, to at least give them
157 one data point on how many users are unhappy with their terms:
</p
>
160 From: Petter Reinholdtsen
161 <br
>Subject: When terms of use turn users away
162 <br
>To: [contact@some.site]
163 <br
>Date: Sat,
07 Dec
2019 16:
30:
56 +
0100
165 <p
>Dear [Site Owner],
</p
>
167 <p
>I was eager to test the system, as it seemed like a fun and
168 interesting application of [some] technology, but after reading the
169 terms of use and privacy policy on
&lt;URL:
170 https://www.[some.site]/terms-of-use
&gt; and
&lt;URL:
171 https://www.[some.site]/privacy-policy
&gt; I want you to know that I
172 decided to turn away. There were several provisions in the terms and
173 policy turning me off, but the final term that convinced me was being
174 asked to sign away my right to reverse engineer.
</p
>
177 <br
>Happy hacking
178 <br
>Petter Reinholdtsen
</p
>
181 <p
>I do not expect much to come out of it, but sharing it here in case
182 others want to give something similar a try too. If companies
183 discover their terms scare away enough people, perhaps they will be
184 improved...
</p
>
186 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
187 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
188 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
193 <title>What would it cost to store all
2018 phone calls in Norway?
</title>
194 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_would_it_cost_to_store_all_2018_phone_calls_in_Norway_.html
</link>
195 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_would_it_cost_to_store_all_2018_phone_calls_in_Norway_.html
</guid>
196 <pubDate>Mon,
25 Nov
2019 20:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
197 <description><p
>Four years ago, I did a back of the envelope calculation on
198 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_would_it_cost_to_store_all_phone_calls_in_Norway_.html
">how
199 much it would cost to store audio recordings of all the phone calls in
200 Norway
</a
>, and came up with NOK
2.1 million / EUR
250 000 for the
201 year
2013. It is time to repeat the calculation using updated
202 numbers. The calculation is based on how much data storage is needed
203 for each minute of audio, how many minutes all the calls in Norway
204 sums up to, multiplied by the cost of data storage.
</p
>
206 <p
>The number of phone call minutes for
2018 was fetched from
207 <a href=
"https://ekomstatistikken.nkom.no/
">the NKOM statistics
208 site
</a
>, and for
2018, land line calls are listed as
434 238 000
209 minutes, while mobile phone calls are listed with
7 542 006 000
210 minutes. The total number of minutes is thus
7 976 244 000. For
211 simplicity, I decided to ignore any advantages in audio compression the
212 last four years, and continue to assume
60 Kbytes/min as the last
215 <p
>Storage prices still varies a lot, but as last time, I decide to
216 take a reasonable big and cheap hard drive, and double its price to
217 include the surrounding costs into account. A
10 TB disk cost less
218 than
4500 NOK /
450 EUR these days, and doubling it give
9000 NOK per
221 <p
>So, with the parameters in place, lets update the old table
222 estimating cost for calls in a given year:
</p
>
224 <table border=
"1">
225 <tr
><th
>Year
</th
><th
>Call minutes
</th
><th
>Size
</th
><th
>Price in NOK / EUR
</th
></tr
>
226 <tr
><td
>2005</td
><td align=
"right
">24 000 000 000</td
><td align=
"right
">1.3 PiB
</td
><td align=
"right
">1 170 000 /
117 000</td
></tr
>
228 <tr
><td
>2012</td
><td align=
"right
">18 000 000 000</td
><td align=
"right
">1.0 PiB
</td
><td align=
"right
">900 000 /
90 000</td
></tr
>
230 <tr
><td
>2013</td
><td align=
"right
">17 000 000 000</td
><td align=
"right
">950 TiB
</td
><td align=
"right
">855 000 /
85 500</td
></tr
>
232 <tr
><td
>2018</td
><td align=
"right
">7 976 244 000</td
><td align=
"right
">445 TiB
</td
><td align=
"right
">401 100 /
40 110</td
></tr
>
235 <p
>Both the cost of storage and the number of phone call minutes have
236 dropped since the last time, bringing the cost down to a level where I
237 guess even small organizations can afford to store the audio recording
238 from every phone call taken in a year in Norway. Of course, this is
239 just the cost of buying the storage equipment. Maintenance, need to
240 be included as well, but the volume of a single year is about a single
241 rack of hard drives, so it is not much more than I could fit in my own
242 home. Wonder how much the electricity bill would raise if I had that
243 kind of storage? I doubt it would be more than a few tens of thousand
244 NOK per year.
</p
>
249 <title>Norwegian movies that might be legal to share on the Internet
</title>
250 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_movies_that_might_be_legal_to_share_on_the_Internet.html
</link>
251 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_movies_that_might_be_legal_to_share_on_the_Internet.html
</guid>
252 <pubDate>Sun,
1 Sep
2019 11:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
253 <description><p
>While working on identifying and counting movies that can be
254 legally shared on the Internet, I also looked at the Norwegian movies
255 listed in IMDb. So far I have identified
54 candidates published
256 before
1940 that might no longer be protected by norwegian copyright
257 law. Of these, only
29 are available at least in part from the
258 Norwegian National Library. It can be assumed that the remaining
25
259 movies are lost. It seem most useful to identify the copyright status
260 of movies that are not lost. To verify that the movie is really no
261 longer protected, one need to verify the list of copyright holders and
262 figure out if and when they died. I
've been able to identify some of
263 them, but for some it is hard to figure out when they died.
</p
>
265 </p
>This is the list of
29 movies both available from the library and
266 possibly no longer protected by copyright law. The year range
267 (
1909-
1979 on the first line) is year of publication and last year
268 with copyright protection.
</p
>
271 1909-
1979 (
70 year) NSB Bergensbanen
1909 - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0347601/
272 1910-
1980 (
70 year) Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons likfærd - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt9299304/
273 1910-
1980 (
70 year) Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons begravelse - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt9299300/
274 1912-
1998 (
86 year) Roald Amundsens Sydpolsferd (
1910-
1912) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt9237500/
275 1913-
2006 (
93 year) Roald Amundsen på sydpolen - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0347886/
276 1917-
1987 (
70 year) Fanden i nøtten - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0346964/
277 1919-
2018 (
99 year) Historien om en gut - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0010259/
278 1920-
1990 (
70 year) Kaksen på Øverland - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0011361/
279 1923-
1993 (
70 year) Norge - en skildring i
6 akter - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0014319/
280 1925-
1997 (
72 year) Roald Amundsen - Ellsworths flyveekspedition
1925 - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0016295/
281 1925-
1995 (
70 year) En verdensreise, eller Da knold og tott vaskede negrene hvite med
13 sæpen - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1018948/
282 1926-
1996 (
70 year) Luftskibet
'Norge
's flugt over polhavet - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017090/
283 1926-
1996 (
70 year) Med
'Maud
' over Polhavet - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017129/
284 1927-
1997 (
70 year) Den store sultan - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1017997/
285 1928-
1998 (
70 year) Noahs ark - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1018917/
286 1928-
1998 (
70 year) Skjæbnen - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1002652/
287 1928-
1998 (
70 year) Chefens cigarett - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1019896/
288 1929-
1999 (
70 year) Se Norge - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020378/
289 1929-
1999 (
70 year) Fra Chr. Michelsen til Kronprins Olav og Prinsesse Martha - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019899/
290 1930-
2000 (
70 year) Mot ukjent land - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021158/
291 1930-
2000 (
70 year) Det er natt - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1017904/
292 1930-
2000 (
70 year) Over Besseggen på motorcykel - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0347721/
293 1931-
2001 (
70 year) Glimt fra New York og den Norske koloni - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021913/
294 1932-
2007 (
75 year) En glad gutt - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022946/
295 1934-
2004 (
70 year) Den lystige radio-trio - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1002628/
296 1935-
2005 (
70 year) Kronprinsparets reise i Nord Norge - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268411/
297 1935-
2005 (
70 year) Stormangrep - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1017998/
298 1936-
2006 (
70 year) En fargesymfoni i blått - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1002762/
299 1939-
2009 (
70 year) Til Vesterheimen - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032036/
302 To be sure which one of these can be legally shared on the Internet,
303 in addition to verifying the right holders list is complete, one need
304 to verify the death year of these persons:
307 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (dead
1910) - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0085085/
308 Gustav Adolf Olsen (missing death year) - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0647652/
309 Gustav Lund (missing death year) - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0526168/
310 John W. Brunius (dead
1937) - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0116307/
311 Ola Cornelius (missing death year) - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1227236/
312 Oskar Omdal (dead
1927) - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3116241/
313 Paul Berge (missing death year) - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0074006/
314 Peter Lykke-Seest (dead
1948) - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0528064/
315 Roald Amundsen (dead
1928) - https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0025468/
316 Sverre Halvorsen (dead
1936) - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1299757/
317 Thomas W. Schwartz (missing death year) - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2616250/
320 <p
>Perhaps you can help me figuring death year of those missing it, or
321 right holders if some are missing in IMDb? It would be nice to have a
322 definite list of Norwegian movies that are legal to share on the
325 </p
>This is the list of
25 movies not available from the library and
326 possibly no longer protected by copyright law:
</p
>
329 1907-
2009 (
102 year) Fiskerlivets farer - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0121288/
330 1912-
2018 (
106 year) Historien omen moder - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382852/
331 1912-
2002 (
90 year) Anny - en gatepiges roman - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0002026/
332 1916-
1986 (
70 year) The Mother Who Paid - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3619226/
333 1917-
2018 (
101 year) En vinternat - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0008740/
334 1917-
2018 (
101 year) Unge hjerter - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0008719/
335 1917-
2018 (
101 year) De forældreløse - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0007972/
336 1918-
2018 (
100 year) Vor tids helte - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0009769/
337 1918-
2018 (
100 year) Lodsens datter - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0009314/
338 1919-
2018 (
99 year) Æresgjesten - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0010939/
339 1921-
2006 (
85 year) Det nye year? - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0347686/
340 1921-
1991 (
70 year) Under Polarkredsens himmel - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0012789/
341 1923-
1993 (
70 year) Nordenfor polarcirkelen - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0014318/
342 1925-
1995 (
70 year) Med
'Stavangerfjord
' til Nordkap - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0016098/
343 1926-
1996 (
70 year) Over Atlanterhavet og gjennem Amerika - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017241/
344 1926-
1996 (
70 year) Hallo! Amerika! - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0016945/
345 1926-
1996 (
70 year) Tigeren Teodors triumf - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1008052/
346 1927-
1997 (
70 year) Rød sultan - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1017979/
347 1927-
1997 (
70 year) Søndagsfiskeren Flag - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1018002/
348 1930-
2000 (
70 year) Ro-ro til fiskeskjær - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1017973/
349 1933-
2003 (
70 year) I kongens klær - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024164/
350 1934-
2004 (
70 year) Eventyret om de tre bukkene bruse - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1007963/
351 1934-
2004 (
70 year) Pål sine høner - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1017966/
352 1937-
2007 (
70 year) Et mesterverk - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1019937/
353 1938-
2008 (
70 year) En Harmony - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1007975/
356 <p
>Several of these movies completely lack right holder information in
357 IMDb and elsewhere. Without access to a copy of the movie, it is
358 often impossible to get the list of people involved in making the
359 movie, making it impossible to figure out the correct copyright
362 <p
>Not listed here are the movies still protected by copyright law.
363 Their copyright terms varies from
79 to
144 years, according to the
364 information I have available so far. One of the non-lost movies might
365 change status next year,
366 <a href=
"https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1008007/
">Mustads Mono from
1920</a
>.
367 The next one might be
368 <a href=
"https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0347215/
">Hvor isbjørnen ferdes
369 from
1935</a
> in
2024.
</p
>
371 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
372 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
373 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
378 <title>Legal to share more than
16,
000 movies listed on IMDB?
</title>
379 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Legal_to_share_more_than_16_000_movies_listed_on_IMDB_.html
</link>
380 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Legal_to_share_more_than_16_000_movies_listed_on_IMDB_.html
</guid>
381 <pubDate>Sat,
10 Aug
2019 12:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
382 <description><p
>The recent announcement of from the New York Public Library on its
384 <a href=
"https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kz4e3e/millions-of-books-are-secretly-in-the-public-domain-you-can-download-them-free
">identifying
385 books published in the USA that are now in the public domain
</a
>,
386 inspired me to update the scripts I use to track down movies that are
387 in the public domain. This involved updating the script used to
388 extract lists of movies believed to be in the public domain, to work
389 with the latest version of the source web sites. In particular the
390 new edition of the
<a href=
"https://retrofilmvault.com/
">Retro Film
391 Vault
</a
> web site now seem to list all the films available from that
392 distributor, bringing the films identified there to more than
12.000
393 movies, and I was able to connect
46% of these to IMDB titles.
</p
>
395 <p
>The new total is
16307 IMDB IDs (aka films) in the public domain or
396 creative commons licensed, and unknown status for
31460 movies
397 (possibly duplicates of the
16307).
</p
>
399 <p
>The complete data set is available from
400 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb
">a
401 public git repository
</a
>, including the scripts used to create it.
</p
>
403 <p
>Anyway, this is the summary of the
28 collected data sources so
407 2361 entries (
50 unique) with and
22472 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-search.json
408 2363 entries (
146 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json
409 299 entries (
32 unique) with and
93 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-cinemovies.json
410 88 entries (
52 unique) with and
36 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-creative-commons.json
411 3190 entries (
1532 unique) with and
13 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-fesfilm-xls.json
412 620 entries (
24 unique) with and
283 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-fesfilm.json
413 1080 entries (
165 unique) with and
651 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-filmchest-com.json
414 830 entries (
13 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-icheckmovies-archive-mochard.json
415 19 entries (
19 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-c-expired-gb.json
416 7410 entries (
7101 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-c-expired-us.json
417 1205 entries (
41 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-pd.json
418 163 entries (
22 unique) with and
88 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-infodigi-pd.json
419 158 entries (
103 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-looney-tunes.json
420 113 entries (
4 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-pd.json
421 182 entries (
71 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-silent.json
422 248 entries (
85 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-manual.json
423 158 entries (
4 unique) with and
64 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-mubi.json
424 85 entries (
1 unique) with and
23 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-openflix.json
425 520 entries (
22 unique) with and
244 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-profilms-pd.json
426 343 entries (
14 unique) with and
10 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies-info.json
427 701 entries (
16 unique) with and
560 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies-net.json
428 74 entries (
13 unique) with and
60 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainreview.json
429 698 entries (
16 unique) with and
118 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomaintorrents.json
430 5506 entries (
2941 unique) with and
6585 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-retrofilmvault.json
431 16 entries (
0 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-thehillproductions.json
432 110 entries (
2 unique) with and
29 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-two-movies-net.json
433 73 entries (
20 unique) with and
131 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-vodo.json
434 16307 unique IMDB title IDs in total,
12509 only in one list,
31460 without IMDB title ID
435 </pre
></p
>
437 <p
>New this time is a list of all the identified IMDB titles, with
438 title, year and running time, provided in free-complete.json. this
439 file also indiciate which source is used to conclude the video is free
440 to distribute.
</p
>
442 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
443 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
444 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
449 <title>Teach kids to protect their privacy - the EDRi way
</title>
450 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Teach_kids_to_protect_their_privacy___the_EDRi_way.html
</link>
451 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Teach_kids_to_protect_their_privacy___the_EDRi_way.html
</guid>
452 <pubDate>Thu,
4 Jul
2019 19:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
453 <description><p
>Childs need to learn how to guard their privacy too. To help them,
454 <a href=
"https://edri.org/
">European Digital Rights (EDRi)
</a
> created
455 a colorful booklet providing information on several privacy related topics,
456 and tips on how to protect ones privacy in the digital age.
</p
>
458 <p
>The
24 page booklet titled Digital Defenders is
459 <a href=
"https://edri.org/digital-defenders-help-kids-defend-their-privacy-around-europe
">available
460 in several languages
</a
>. Thanks to the valuable contributions from
461 members of
<a href=
"https://efn.no/
">the Electronic Foundation Norway
462 (EFN)
</a
> and others, it is also available in Norwegian Bokmål.
463 If you would like to have it available in your language too,
464 <a href=
"https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/efn/privacy4kids/
">contribute
465 via Weblate
</a
> and get in touch.
</p
>
467 <p
>But a funny, well written and good looking PDF do not have much
468 impact, unless it is read by the right audience. To increase the
469 chance of kids reading it, I am currently assisting EFN in getting
470 copies printed on paper to distribute on the street and in class
471 rooms. Print the booklet was made possible thanks to a small et of
472 great sponsors. Thank you very much to each and every one of them! I
473 hope to have the printed booklet ready to hand out on Tuesday, when
474 <a href=
"https://www.nuug.no/
>">the Norwegian Unix Users Group
</a
> is
475 organizing
<a href=
"https://wiki.nuug.no/sommerfest2019
">its yearly
476 barbecue for geeks and free software zealots in the Oslo area
</a
>. If
477 you are nearby, feel free to come by and check out the party and the
480 <p
>If the booklet prove to be a success, it would be great to get
481 more sponsoring and distribute it to every kid in the country. :)
</p
>
483 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
484 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
485 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
490 <title>Jami/Ring, finally functioning peer to peer communication client
</title>
491 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Jami_Ring__finally_functioning_peer_to_peer_communication_client.html
</link>
492 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Jami_Ring__finally_functioning_peer_to_peer_communication_client.html
</guid>
493 <pubDate>Wed,
19 Jun
2019 08:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
494 <description><p
>Some years ago, in
2016, I
495 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html
">wrote
496 for the first time about
</a
> the Ring peer to peer messaging system.
497 It would provide messaging without any central server coordinating the
498 system and without requiring all users to register a phone number or
499 own a mobile phone. Back then, I could not get it to work, and put it
500 aside until it had seen more development. A few days ago I decided to
501 give it another try, and am happy to report that this time I am able
502 to not only send and receive messages, but also place audio and video
503 calls. But only if UDP is not blocked into your network.
</p
>
505 <p
>The Ring system changed name earlier this year to
506 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jami_(software)
">Jami
</a
>. I
507 tried doing web search for
'ring
' when I discovered it for the first
508 time, and can only applaud this change as it is impossible to find
509 something called Ring among the noise of other uses of that word. Now
510 you can search for
'jami
' and this client and
511 <a href=
"https://jami.net/
">the Jami system
</a
> is the first hit at
512 least on duckduckgo.
</p
>
514 <p
>Jami will by default encrypt messages as well as audio and video
515 calls, and try to send them directly between the communicating parties
516 if possible. If this proves impossible (for example if both ends are
517 behind NAT), it will use a central SIP TURN server maintained by the
518 Jami project. Jami can also be a normal SIP client. If the SIP
519 server is unencrypted, the audio and video calls will also be
520 unencrypted. This is as far as I know the only case where Jami will
521 do anything without encryption.
</p
>
523 <p
>Jami is available for several platforms: Linux, Windows, MacOSX,
524 Android, iOS, and Android TV. It is included in Debian already. Jami
525 also work for those using F-Droid without any Google connections,
527 <a href=
"https://git.jami.net/savoirfairelinux/ring-project/wikis/technical/Protocol
">The
528 protocol
</a
> is described in the Ring project wiki. The system uses a
529 distributed hash table (DHT) system (similar to BitTorrent) running
530 over UDP. On one of the networks I use, I discovered Jami failed to
531 work. I tracked this down to the fact that incoming UDP packages
532 going to ports
1-
49999 were blocked, and the DHT would pick a random
533 port and end up in the low range most of the time. After talking to
534 the developers, I solved this by enabling the dhtproxy in the
535 settings, thus using TCP to talk to a central DHT proxy instead of
537 peering directly with others. I
've been told the developers are
538 working on allowing DHT to use TCP to avoid this problem. I also ran
539 into a problem when trying to talk to the version of Ring included in
540 Debian Stable (Stretch). Apparently the protocol changed between
541 beta2 and the current version, making these clients incompatible.
542 Hopefully the protocol will not be made incompatible in the
545 <p
>It is worth noting that while looking at Jami and its features, I
546 came across another communication platform I have not tested yet. The
547 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_(protocol)
">Tox protocol
</a
>
548 and
<a href=
"https://tox.chat/
">family of Tox clients
</a
>. It might
549 become the topic of a future blog post.
</p
>
551 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
552 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
553 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
558 <title>More sales number for my Free Culture paper editions (
2019-edition)
</title>
559 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_sales_number_for_my_Free_Culture_paper_editions__2019_edition_.html
</link>
560 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_sales_number_for_my_Free_Culture_paper_editions__2019_edition_.html
</guid>
561 <pubDate>Tue,
11 Jun
2019 16:
05:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
562 <description><p
>The first book I published,
563 <a href=
"http://www.free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture by Lawrence
564 Lessig
</a
>, is still selling a few copies. Not a lot, but enough to
565 have contributed slightly over $
500 to the
<a
566 href=
"https://creativecommons.org/
">Creative Commons Corporation
</a
>
567 so far. All the profit is sent there. Most books are still sold via
568 Amazon (
83 copies), with Ingram second (
49) and Lulu (
12) and Machette (
7) as
569 minor channels. Bying directly from Lulu bring the largest cut to
570 Creative Commons. The English Edition sold
80 copies so far, the
571 French
59 copies, and Norwegian only
8 copies. Nothing impressive,
572 but nice to see the work we put down is still being appreciated. The
573 ebook edition is available for free from
574 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">Github
</a
>.
</p
>
576 <table border=
"0">
577 <tr
><th rowspan=
"2" valign=
"bottom
">Title / language
</th
>
578 <th colspan=
"7">Quantity
</th
></tr
>
580 <th
>2016 jan-jun
</th
>
581 <th
>2016 jul-dec
</th
>
582 <th
>2017 jan-jun
</th
>
583 <th
>2017 jul-dec
</th
>
584 <th
>2018 jan-jun
</th
>
585 <th
>2018 jul-dec
</th
>
586 <th
>2019 jan-may
</th
>
590 <td
><a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-
22645082.html
">Culture Libre / French
</a
></td
>
591 <td align=
"right
">3</td
>
592 <td align=
"right
">6</td
>
593 <td align=
"right
">19</td
>
594 <td align=
"right
">11</td
>
595 <td align=
"right
">7</td
>
596 <td align=
"right
">6</td
>
597 <td align=
"right
">7</td
>
601 <td
><a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-
22441576.html
">Fri kultur / Norwegian
</a
></td
>
602 <td align=
"right
">7</td
>
603 <td align=
"right
">1</td
>
604 <td align=
"right
">0</td
>
605 <td align=
"right
">0</td
>
606 <td align=
"right
">0</td
>
607 <td align=
"right
">0</td
>
608 <td align=
"right
">0</td
>
612 <td
><a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-
22440520.html
">Free Culture / English
</a
></td
>
613 <td align=
"right
">14</td
>
614 <td align=
"right
">27</td
>
615 <td align=
"right
">16</td
>
616 <td align=
"right
">9</td
>
617 <td align=
"right
">3</td
>
618 <td align=
"right
">7</td
>
619 <td align=
"right
">3</td
>
623 <td
>Total
</td
>
624 <td align=
"right
">24</td
>
625 <td align=
"right
">34</td
>
626 <td align=
"right
">35</td
>
627 <td align=
"right
">20</td
>
628 <td align=
"right
">10</td
>
629 <td align=
"right
">13</td
>
630 <td align=
"right
">10</td
>
635 <p
>It is fun to see the French edition being more popular than the
636 English one.
</p
>
638 <p
>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
639 language, I would be happy to help make it happen. Please get in
645 <title>Official MIME type
"text/vnd.sosi
" for SOSI map data
</title>
646 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Official_MIME_type__text_vnd_sosi__for_SOSI_map_data.html
</link>
647 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Official_MIME_type__text_vnd_sosi__for_SOSI_map_data.html
</guid>
648 <pubDate>Tue,
4 Jun
2019 09:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
649 <description><p
>Just
15 days ago,
650 <ahref=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MIME_type__text_vnd_sosi__for_SOSI_map_data.html
">I
651 mentioned
</a
> my submission to IANA to register an official MIME type
652 for the SOSI vector map format. This morning, just an hour ago, I was
654 <a href=
"https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/text/vnd.sosi
">the
655 MIME type
"text/vnd.sosi
"</a
> is registered for this format. In
656 addition to this registration, my
657 <a href=
"https://github.com/file/file/blob/master/magic/Magdir/sosi
">file(
1)
658 patch for a pattern matching rule for SOSI files
</a
> has been accepted
659 into the official source of that program (pending a new release), and
660 I
've been told by the team behind
661 <a href=
"https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM/
">PRONOM
</a
> that
662 the SOSI format will be included in the next release of PRONOM, which
663 they plan to release this summer around July.
</p
>
665 <p
>I am very happy to see all of this fall into place, for use by
666 <a href=
"https://github.com/arkivverket/noark5-tjenestegrensesnitt-standard/
">the
667 Noark
5 Tjenestegrensesnitt
</a
> implementations.
</p
>
669 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
670 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
671 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
676 <title>The space rover coquine, or how I ended up on the dark side of the moon
</title>
677 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_space_rover_coquine__or_how_I_ended_up_on_the_dark_side_of_the_moon.html
</link>
678 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_space_rover_coquine__or_how_I_ended_up_on_the_dark_side_of_the_moon.html
</guid>
679 <pubDate>Sun,
2 Jun
2019 23:
55:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
680 <description><p
>A while back a college and friend from Debian and the Skolelinux /
681 Debian Edu project approached me, asking if I knew someone that might
682 be interested in helping out with a technology project he was running
683 as a teacher at
<a href=
"https://www.ecolefrancodanoise.dk/
">L
'école
684 franco-danoise
</a
> - the Danish-French school and kindergarden. The
685 kids were building robots, rovers. The story behind it is to build a
687 <a href=
"http://blog.ecolefrancodanoise.dk/first-week-on-the-dark-side
">on
688 the dark side of the moon
</a
>, and remote control it. As travel cost
689 was a bit high for the final destination, and they wanted to test the
690 concept first, he was looking for volunteers to host a rover for the
691 kids to control in a foreign country. I ended up volunteering as a
692 host, and last week the rover arrived. It took a while to arrive
693 after
<a href=
"http://blog.ecolefrancodanoise.dk/model-moms
">it was
694 built and shipped
</a
>, because of customs confusion. Luckily we were
695 able fix it quickly with help from my colleges at work.
</p
>
697 <p
>This is what it looked like when the rover arrived. Note the cute
698 eyes looking up on me from the wrapping
</p
>
700 <img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2019-
06-
02-robot-dark-side-of-moon-esken-med-det-rare-i.jpeg
" width=
"32%
" style=
"clear:left
"/
>
701 <img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2019-
06-
02-robot-dark-side-of-moon-den-ser-meg.jpeg
" width=
"32%
" style=
"clear:left
"/
>
702 <img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2019-
06-
02-robot-dark-side-of-moon-en-skrue-loes.jpeg
" width=
"32%
" style=
"clear:left
"/
>
704 <p style=
"text-align:left
">Once the robot arrived, we needed to track
705 down batteries and figure out how to build custom firmware for it with
706 the appropriate wifi settings. I asked a friend if I could get two
707 18650 batteries from his pile of Tesla batteries (he had them from the
708 wrack of a crashed Tesla), so now the rover is running on Tesla
712 <a href=
"https://gitlab.com/ecolefrancodanoise/arduino-efd/
">the rover
713 firmware
</a
> proved a bit harder, as the code did not work out of the
714 box with the Arduino IDE package in Debian Buster. I suspect this is
716 <a href=
"https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/pull/
2703"> license problem
717 with arduino
</a
> blocking Debian from upgrading to the latest version.
718 In the end we gave up debugging why the IDE failed to find the
719 required libraries, and ended up using the Arduino Makefile from the
720 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/arduino-mk
">arduino-mk Debian
721 package
</a
> instead. Unfortunately the camera library is missing from
722 the Arduino environment in Debian, so we disabled the camera support
723 for the first firmware build, to get something up and running. With
724 this reduced firmware, the robot could be controlled via the
725 controller server, driving around and measuring distance using its
726 internal acoustic sensor.
</p
>
728 <p
>Next, With some help from my friend in Denmark, which checked in the
729 camera library into the gitlab repository for me to use, we were able
730 to build a new and more complete version of the firmware, and the
731 robot is now up and running. This is what the
"commander
" web page
732 look like after taking a measurement and a snapshot:
</p
>
734 <img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2019-
06-
02-robot-dark-side-of-moon-commander.png
" width=
"40%
" border=
"1" align=
"center
"/
>
736 <p
>If you want to learn more about this project, you can check out the
737 <a href=
"https://hackaday.io/project/
164082-the-dark-side-challenge
">The
738 Dark Side Challenge
</a
> Hackaday web pages.
</p
>
740 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
741 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
742 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
747 <title>Nikita version
0.4 released - free software archive API server
</title>
748 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nikita_version_0_4_released___free_software_archive_API_server.html
</link>
749 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nikita_version_0_4_released___free_software_archive_API_server.html
</guid>
750 <pubDate>Wed,
22 May
2019 11:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
751 <description><p
>This morning, a new release of
752 <a href=
"https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core/
">Nikita
753 Noark
5 core project
</a
> was
754 <a href=
"https://lists.nuug.no/pipermail/nikita-noark/
2019-May/
000468.html
">announced
755 on the project mailing list
</a
>. The Nikita free software solution is
756 an implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark
5 used by
757 government offices in Norway. These were the changes in version
0.4
758 since version
0.3, see the email link above for links to a demo site:
</p
>
762 <li
>Roll out OData handling to all endpoints where applicable
</li
>
763 <li
>Changed the relation key for
"ny-journalpost
" to the official one.
</li
>
764 <li
>Better link generation on outgoing links.
</li
>
765 <li
>Tidy up code and make code and approaches more consistent throughout
766 the codebase
</li
>
767 <li
>Update rels to be in compliance with updated version in the
768 interface standard
</li
>
769 <li
>Avoid printing links on empty objects as they can
't have links
</li
>
770 <li
>Small bug fixes and improvements
</li
>
771 <li
>Start moving generation of outgoing links to @Service layer so access
772 control can be used when generating links
</li
>
773 <li
>Log exception that was being swallowed so it
's traceable
</li
>
774 <li
>Fix name mapping problem
</li
>
775 <li
>Update templated printing so templated should only be printed if it
776 is set true. Requires more work to roll out across entire
777 application.
</li
>
778 <li
>Remove Record-
>DocumentObject as per domain model of n5v4
</li
>
779 <li
>Add ability to delete lists filtered with OData
</li
>
780 <li
>Return NO_CONTENT (
204) on delete as per interface standard
</li
>
781 <li
>Introduce support for ConstraintViolationException exception
</li
>
782 <li
>Make Service classes extend NoarkService
</li
>
783 <li
>Make code base respect X-Forwarded-Host, X-Forwarded-Proto and
784 X-Forwarded-Port
</li
>
785 <li
>Update CorrespondencePart* code to be more in line with Single
786 Responsibility Principle
</li
>
787 <li
>Make package name follow directory structure
</li
>
788 <li
>Make sure Document number starts at
1, not
0</li
>
789 <li
>Fix isues discovered by FindBugs
</li
>
790 <li
>Update from Date to ZonedDateTime
</li
>
791 <li
>Fix wrong tablename
</li
>
792 <li
>Introduce Service layer tests
</li
>
793 <li
>Improvements to CorrespondencePart
</li
>
794 <li
>Continued work on Class / Classificationsystem
</li
>
795 <li
>Fix feature where authors were stored as storageLocations
</li
>
796 <li
>Update HQL builder for OData
</li
>
797 <li
>Update OData search capability from webpage
</li
>
801 <p
>If free and open standardized archiving API sound interesting to
802 you, please contact us on IRC
803 (
<a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/%
23nikita
">#nikita on
804 irc.freenode.net
</a
>) or email
805 (
<a href=
"https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark
">nikita-noark
806 mailing list
</a
>).
</p
>
808 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
809 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
810 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
815 <title>MIME type
"text/vnd.sosi
" for SOSI map data
</title>
816 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MIME_type__text_vnd_sosi__for_SOSI_map_data.html
</link>
817 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MIME_type__text_vnd_sosi__for_SOSI_map_data.html
</guid>
818 <pubDate>Mon,
20 May
2019 08:
35:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
819 <description><p
>As part of my involvement in the work to
820 <a href=
"https://github.com/arkivverket/noark5-tjenestegrensesnitt-standard
">standardise
821 a REST based API for Noark
5</a
>, the Norwegian archiving standard, I
822 spent some time the last few months to try to register a
823 <a href=
"https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/
">MIME type
</a
>
824 and
<a href=
"https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM/
">PRONOM
825 code
</a
> for the SOSI file format. The background is that there is a
826 set of formats approved for long term storage and archiving in Norway,
827 and among these formats, SOSI is the only format missing a MIME type
828 and PRONOM code.
</p
>
830 <p
>What is SOSI, you might ask? To quote Wikipedia: SOSI is short for
831 Samordnet Opplegg for Stedfestet Informasjon (literally
"Coordinated
832 Approach for Spatial Information
", but more commonly expanded in
833 English to Systematic Organization of Spatial Information). It is a
834 text based file format for geo-spatial vector information used in
835 Norway. Information about the SOSI format can be found in English
836 from
<a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSI
">Wikipedia
</a
>. The
837 specification is available in Norwegian from
838 <a href=
"https://www.kartverket.no/geodataarbeid/Standarder/SOSI/
">the
839 Norwegian mapping authority
</a
>. The SOSI standard, which originated
840 in the beginning of nineteen eighties, was the inspiration and formed the
841 basis for the XML based
842 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_Markup_Language
">Geography
843 Markup Language
</a
>.
</p
>
845 <p
>I have so far written
846 <a href=
"https://github.com/file/file/pull/
67">a pattern matching
847 rule
</a
> for the file(
1) unix tool to recognize SOSI files, submitted
848 a request to the PRONOM project to have a PRONOM ID assigned to the
849 format (reference TNA1555078202S60), and today send a request to IANA
850 to register the
"text/vnd.sosi
" MIME type for this format (referanse
851 <a href=
"https://tools.iana.org/public-view/viewticket/
1143144">IANA
852 #
1143144</a
>). If all goes well, in a few months, anyone implementing
853 the Noark
5 Tjenestegrensesnitt API spesification should be able to
854 use an official MIME type and PRONOM code for SOSI files. In
855 addition, anyone using SOSI files on Linux should be able to
856 automatically recognise the format and web sites handing out SOSI
857 files can begin providing a more specific MIME type. So far, SOSI
858 files has been handed out from web sites using the
859 "application/octet-stream
" MIME type, which is just a nice way of
860 stating
"I do not know
". Soon, we will know. :)
</p
>
862 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
863 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
864 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
869 <title>PlantUML for text based UML diagram modelling - nice free software
</title>
870 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PlantUML_for_text_based_UML_diagram_modelling___nice_free_software.html
</link>
871 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PlantUML_for_text_based_UML_diagram_modelling___nice_free_software.html
</guid>
872 <pubDate>Mon,
25 Mar
2019 09:
35:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
873 <description><p
>As part of my involvement with the
874 <a href=
"https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core/
">Nikita
875 Noark
5 core project
</a
>, I have been proposing improvements to the
876 API specification created by
<a href=
"https://www.arkivverket.no/
">The
877 National Archives of Norway
</a
> and helped migrating the text from a
878 version control system unfriendly binary format (docx) to Markdown in
879 git. Combined with the migration to a public git repository (on
880 github), this has made it possible for anyone to suggest improvement
881 to the text.
</p
>
883 <p
>The specification is filled with UML diagrams. I believe the
884 original diagrams were modelled using Sparx Systems Enterprise
885 Architect, and exported as EMF files for import into docx. This
886 approach make it very hard to track changes using a version control
887 system. To improve the situation I have been looking for a good text
888 based UML format with associated command line free software tools on
889 Linux and Windows, to allow anyone to send in corrections to the UML
890 diagrams in the specification. The tool must be text based to work
891 with git, and command line to be able to run it automatically to
892 generate the diagram images. Finally, it must be free software to
893 allow anyone, even those that can not accept a non-free software
894 license, to contribute.
</p
>
896 <p
>I did not know much about free software UML modelling tools when I
897 started. I have used dia and inkscape for simple modelling in the
898 past, but neither are available on Windows, as far as I could tell. I
900 <a href=
"https://modeling-languages.com/text-uml-tools-complete-list/
">list
901 of text mode uml tools
</a
>, and tested out a few of the tools listed
902 there.
<a href=
"http://plantuml.com/
">The PlantUML tool
</a
> seemed
903 most promising. After verifying that the packages
904 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/plantuml
">is available in
905 Debian
</a
> and found
<a href=
"https://github.com/plantuml/plantuml
">its
906 Java source
</a
> under a GPL license on github, I set out to test if it
907 could represent the diagrams we needed, ie the ones currently in
908 <a href=
"https://github.com/arkivverket/noark5-tjenestegrensesnitt-standard/
">the
909 Noark
5 Tjenestegrensesnitt specification
</a
>. I am happy to report
910 that it could represent them, even thought it have a few warts here
913 <p
>After a few days of modelling I completed the task this weekend. A
914 temporary link to the complete set of diagrams (original and from
915 PlantUML) is available in
916 <a href=
"https://github.com/arkivverket/noark5-tjenestegrensesnitt-standard/issues/
76">the
917 github issue discussing the need for a text based UML format
</a
>, but
918 please note I lack a sensible tool to convert EMF files to PNGs, so
919 the
"original
" rendering is not as good as the original was in the
920 publised PDF.
</p
>
922 <p
>Here is an example UML diagram, showing the core classes for
923 keeping metadata about archived documents:
</p
>
927 skinparam classAttributeIconSize
0
929 !include media/uml-class-arkivskaper.iuml
930 !include media/uml-class-arkiv.iuml
931 !include media/uml-class-klassifikasjonssystem.iuml
932 !include media/uml-class-klasse.iuml
933 !include media/uml-class-arkivdel.iuml
934 !include media/uml-class-mappe.iuml
935 !include media/uml-class-merknad.iuml
936 !include media/uml-class-registrering.iuml
937 !include media/uml-class-basisregistrering.iuml
938 !include media/uml-class-dokumentbeskrivelse.iuml
939 !include media/uml-class-dokumentobjekt.iuml
940 !include media/uml-class-konvertering.iuml
941 !include media/uml-datatype-elektronisksignatur.iuml
943 Arkivstruktur.Arkivskaper
"+arkivskaper
1..*
" <-o
"+arkiv
0..*
" Arkivstruktur.Arkiv
944 Arkivstruktur.Arkiv o--
> "+underarkiv
0..*
" Arkivstruktur.Arkiv
945 Arkivstruktur.Arkiv
"+arkiv
1" o--
> "+arkivdel
0..*
" Arkivstruktur.Arkivdel
946 Arkivstruktur.Klassifikasjonssystem
"+klassifikasjonssystem [
0.
.1]
" <--o
"+arkivdel
1..*
" Arkivstruktur.Arkivdel
947 Arkivstruktur.Klassifikasjonssystem
"+klassifikasjonssystem [
0.
.1]
" o--
> "+klasse
0..*
" Arkivstruktur.Klasse
948 Arkivstruktur.Arkivdel
"+arkivdel
0.
.1" o--
> "+mappe
0..*
" Arkivstruktur.Mappe
949 Arkivstruktur.Arkivdel
"+arkivdel
0.
.1" o--
> "+registrering
0..*
" Arkivstruktur.Registrering
950 Arkivstruktur.Klasse
"+klasse
0.
.1" o--
> "+mappe
0..*
" Arkivstruktur.Mappe
951 Arkivstruktur.Klasse
"+klasse
0.
.1" o--
> "+registrering
0..*
" Arkivstruktur.Registrering
952 Arkivstruktur.Mappe --
> "+undermappe
0..*
" Arkivstruktur.Mappe
953 Arkivstruktur.Mappe
"+mappe
0.
.1" o--
> "+registrering
0..*
" Arkivstruktur.Registrering
954 Arkivstruktur.Merknad
"+merknad
0..*
" <--* Arkivstruktur.Mappe
955 Arkivstruktur.Merknad
"+merknad
0..*
" <--* Arkivstruktur.Dokumentbeskrivelse
956 Arkivstruktur.Basisregistrering -|
> Arkivstruktur.Registrering
957 Arkivstruktur.Merknad
"+merknad
0..*
" <--* Arkivstruktur.Basisregistrering
958 Arkivstruktur.Registrering
"+registrering
1..*
" o--
> "+dokumentbeskrivelse
0..*
" Arkivstruktur.Dokumentbeskrivelse
959 Arkivstruktur.Dokumentbeskrivelse
"+dokumentbeskrivelse
1" o-
> "+dokumentobjekt
0..*
" Arkivstruktur.Dokumentobjekt
960 Arkivstruktur.Dokumentobjekt *-
> "+konvertering
0..*
" Arkivstruktur.Konvertering
961 Arkivstruktur.ElektroniskSignatur -[hidden]-
> Arkivstruktur.Dokumentobjekt
965 <p
><a href=
"http://plantuml.com/class-diagram
">The format
</a
> is quite
966 compact, with little redundant information. The text expresses
967 entities and relations, and there is little layout related fluff. One
968 can reuse content by using include files, allowing for consistent
969 naming across several diagrams. The include files can be standalone
970 PlantUML too. Here is the content of
971 <tt
>media/uml-class-arkivskaper.iuml
<tt
>:
</p
>
975 class Arkivstruktur.Arkivskaper
<Arkivenhet
> {
976 +arkivskaperID : string
977 +arkivskaperNavn : string
978 +beskrivelse : string [
0.
.1]
983 <p
>This is what the complete diagram for the PlantUML notation above
986 <p
><img width=
"80%
" src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2019-
03-
25-noark5-plantuml-diagrameksempel.png
"></p
>
988 <p
>A cool feature of PlantUML is that the generated PNG files include
989 the entire original source diagram as text. The source (with include
990 statements expanded) can be extracted using for example
991 <tt
>exiftool
</tt
>. Another cool feature is that parts of the entities
992 can be hidden after inclusion. This allow to use include files with
993 all attributes listed, even for UML diagrams that should not list any
994 attributes.
</p
>
996 <p
>The diagram also show some of the warts. Some times the layout
997 engine place text labels on top of each other, and some times it place
998 the class boxes too close to each other, not leaving room for the
999 labels on the relationship arrows. The former can be worked around by
1000 placing extra newlines in the labes (ie
"\n
"). I did not do it here
1001 to be able to demonstrate the issue. I have not found a good way
1002 around the latter, so I normally try to reduce the problem by changing
1003 from vertical to horizontal links to improve the layout.
</p
>
1005 <p
>All in all, I am quite happy with PlantUML, and very impressed with
1006 how quickly its lead developer responds to questions. So far I got an
1007 answer to my questions in a few hours when I send an email. I
1008 definitely recommend looking at PlantUML if you need to make UML
1009 diagrams. Note, PlantUML can draw a lot more than class relations.
1010 Check out the documention for a complete list. :)
</p
>
1012 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1013 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1014 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
1019 <title>Release
0.3 of free software archive API system Nikita announced
</title>
1020 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Release_0_3_of_free_software_archive_API_system_Nikita_announced.html
</link>
1021 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Release_0_3_of_free_software_archive_API_system_Nikita_announced.html
</guid>
1022 <pubDate>Sun,
24 Mar
2019 14:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1023 <description><p
>Yesterday, a new release of
1024 <a href=
"https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core/
">Nikita
1025 Noark
5 core project
</a
> was
1026 <a href=
"https://lists.nuug.no/pipermail/nikita-noark/
2019-March/
000451.html
">announced
1027 on the project mailing list
</a
>. The free software solution is an
1028 implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark
5 used by
1029 government offices in Norway. These were the changes in version
0.3
1030 since version
0.2.1 (from NEWS.md):
</p
>
1033 <li
>Improved ClassificationSystem and Class behaviour.
</li
>
1034 <li
>Tidied up known inconsistencies between domain model and hateaos links.
</li
>
1035 <li
>Added experimental code for blockchain integration.
</li
>
1036 <li
>Make token expiry time configurable at upstart from properties file.
</li
>
1037 <li
>Continued work on OData search syntax.
</li
>
1038 <li
>Started work on pagination for entities, partly implemented for Saksmappe.
</li
>
1039 <li
>Finalise ClassifiedCode Metadata entity.
</li
>
1040 <li
>Implement mechanism to check if authentication token is still
1041 valid. This allow the GUI to return a more sensible message to the
1042 user if the token is expired.
</li
>
1043 <li
>Reintroduce browse.html page to allow user to browse JSON API using
1044 hateoas links.
</li
>
1045 <li
>Fix bug in handling file/mappe sequence number. Year change was
1046 not properly handled.
</li
>
1047 <li
>Update application yml files to be in sync with current development.
</li
>
1048 <li
>Stop
'converting
' everything to PDF using libreoffice. Only
1049 convert the file formats doc, ppt, xls, docx, pptx, xlsx, odt, odp
1051 <li
>Continued code style fixing, making code more readable.
</li
>
1052 <li
>Minor bug fixes.
</li
>
1056 <p
>If free and open standardized archiving API sound interesting to
1057 you, please contact us on IRC
1058 (
<a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/%
23nikita
">#nikita on
1059 irc.freenode.net
</a
>) or email
1060 (
<a href=
"https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark
">nikita-noark
1061 mailing list
</a
>).
</p
>
1063 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1064 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1065 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
1070 <title>Websocket from Kraken in Valutakrambod
</title>
1071 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Websocket_from_Kraken_in_Valutakrambod.html
</link>
1072 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Websocket_from_Kraken_in_Valutakrambod.html
</guid>
1073 <pubDate>Fri,
1 Feb
2019 22:
25:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1074 <description><p
>Yesterday, the Kraken virtual currency exchange announced
1075 <a href=
"https://blog.kraken.com/post/
2019/websockets-public-api-launching-soon/
">their
1076 Websocket service
</a
>, providing a stream of exchange updates to its
1077 clients. Getting updated rates quickly is a good idea, so I used
1078 their
<a href=
"https://www.kraken.com/en-us/help/websocket-api
">API
1079 documentation
</a
> and added Websocket support to the Kraken service in
1080 Valutakrambod today. The python library can now get updates
1081 from Kraken several times per second, instead of every time the
1082 information is polled from the REST API.
</p
>
1084 <p
>If this sound interesting to you, the code for valutakrambod is
1086 <a href=
"http://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/valutakrambod
">github
</a
>.
1087 Here is example output from the example client displaying rates in a
1088 curses view:
</p
>
1090 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
1091 Name Pair Bid Ask Spr Ftcd Age
1092 BitcoinsNorway BTCEUR
2959.2800 3021.0500 2.0%
36 nan nan
1093 Bitfinex BTCEUR
3087.9000 3088.0000 0.0%
36 37 nan
1094 Bitmynt BTCEUR
3001.8700 3135.4600 4.3%
36 52 nan
1095 Bitpay BTCEUR
3003.8659 nan nan%
35 nan nan
1096 Bitstamp BTCEUR
3008.0000 3010.2300 0.1%
0 1 1
1097 Bl3p BTCEUR
3000.6700 3010.9300 0.3%
1 nan nan
1098 Coinbase BTCEUR
2992.1800 3023.2500 1.0%
34 nan nan
1099 Kraken+BTCEUR
3005.7000 3006.6000 0.0%
0 1 0
1100 Paymium BTCEUR
2940.0100 2993.4400 1.8%
0 2688 nan
1101 BitcoinsNorway BTCNOK
29000.0000 29360.7400 1.2%
36 nan nan
1102 Bitmynt BTCNOK
29115.6400 29720.7500 2.0%
36 52 nan
1103 Bitpay BTCNOK
29029.2512 nan nan%
36 nan nan
1104 Coinbase BTCNOK
28927.6000 29218.5900 1.0%
35 nan nan
1105 MiraiEx BTCNOK
29097.7000 29741.4200 2.2%
36 nan nan
1106 BitcoinsNorway BTCUSD
3385.4200 3456.0900 2.0%
36 nan nan
1107 Bitfinex BTCUSD
3538.5000 3538.6000 0.0%
36 45 nan
1108 Bitpay BTCUSD
3443.4600 nan nan%
34 nan nan
1109 Bitstamp BTCUSD
3443.0100 3445.0500 0.1%
0 2 1
1110 Coinbase BTCUSD
3428.1600 3462.6300 1.0%
33 nan nan
1111 Gemini BTCUSD
3445.8800 3445.8900 0.0%
36 326 nan
1112 Hitbtc BTCUSD
3473.4700 3473.0700 -
0.0%
0 0 0
1113 Kraken+BTCUSD
3444.4000 3445.6000 0.0%
0 1 0
1114 Exchangerates EURNOK
9.6685 9.6685 0.0%
36 22226 nan
1115 Norgesbank EURNOK
9.6685 9.6685 0.0%
36 22226 nan
1116 Bitstamp EURUSD
1.1440 1.1462 0.2%
0 1 2
1117 Exchangerates EURUSD
1.1471 1.1471 0.0%
36 22226 nan
1118 BitcoinsNorway LTCEUR
1.0009 22.6538 95.6%
35 nan nan
1119 BitcoinsNorway LTCNOK
259.0900 264.9300 2.2%
35 nan nan
1120 BitcoinsNorway LTCUSD
0.0000 29.0000 100.0%
35 nan nan
1121 Norgesbank USDNOK
8.4286 8.4286 0.0%
36 22226 nan
1122 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
1124 <p
>Yes, I notice the strange negative spread on Hitbtc. I
've seen the
1125 same on Kraken. Another strange observation is that Kraken some times
1126 announce trade orders a fraction of a second in the future. I really
1127 wonder what is going on there.
</p
>
1129 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1130 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1131 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
1136 <title>Debian now got everything you need to program Micro:bit
</title>
1137 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_got_everything_you_need_to_program_Micro_bit.html
</link>
1138 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_got_everything_you_need_to_program_Micro_bit.html
</guid>
1139 <pubDate>Tue,
22 Jan
2019 17:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1140 <description><p
>I am amazed and very pleased to discover that since a few days ago,
1141 everything you need to program the
<a href=
"https://microbit.org/
">BBC
1142 micro:bit
</a
> is available from the Debian archive. All this is
1143 thanks to the hard work of Nick Morrott and the Debian python
1144 packaging team. The micro:bit project recommend the mu-editor to
1145 program the microcomputer, as this editor will take care of all the
1146 machinery required to injekt/flash micropython alongside the program
1147 into the micro:bit, as long as the pieces are available.
</p
>
1149 <p
>There are three main pieces involved. The first to enter Debian
1151 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/python-uflash
">python-uflash
</a
>,
1152 which was accepted into the archive
2019-
01-
12. The next one was
1153 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/mu-editor
">mu-editor
</a
>, which
1154 showed up
2019-
01-
13. The final and hardest part to to into the
1156 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/firmware-microbit-micropython
">firmware-microbit-micropython
</a
>,
1157 which needed to get its build system and dependencies into Debian
1158 before it was accepted
2019-
01-
20. The last one is already in Debian
1159 Unstable and should enter Debian Testing / Buster in three days. This
1160 all allow any user of the micro:bit to get going by simply running
1161 'apt install mu-editor
' when using Testing or Unstable, and once
1162 Buster is released as stable, all the users of Debian stable will be
1163 catered for.
</p
>
1165 <p
>As a minor final touch, I added rules to
1166 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram
">the isenkram
1167 package
</a
> for recognizing micro:bit and recommend the mu-editor
1168 package. This make sure any user of the isenkram desktop daemon will
1169 get a popup suggesting to install mu-editor then the USB cable from
1170 the micro:bit is inserted for the first time.
</p
>
1172 <p
>This should make it easier to have fun.
</p
>
1174 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1175 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1176 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
1181 <title>CasparCG Server for TV broadcast playout in Debian
</title>
1182 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/CasparCG_Server_for_TV_broadcast_playout_in_Debian.html
</link>
1183 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/CasparCG_Server_for_TV_broadcast_playout_in_Debian.html
</guid>
1184 <pubDate>Tue,
15 Jan
2019 00:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1185 <description><p
>The layered video playout server created by Sveriges Television,
1186 <a href=
"https://casparcg.com/
">CasparCG Server
</a
>, entered Debian
1187 today. This completes many months of work to get the source ready to
1188 go into Debian. The first upload to the Debian NEW queue happened a
1189 month ago, but the work upstream to prepare it for Debian started more
1190 than two and a half month ago. So far
1191 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/casparcg-server
">the
1192 casparcg-server package
</a
> is only available for amd64, but I hope
1193 this can be improved. The package is in contrib because it depend on
1194 the
<a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fdk-aac
">non-free fdk-aac
1195 library
</a
>. The Debian package lack support for streaming web pages
1196 because Debian is missing CEF, Chromium Embedded Framework. CEF is
1197 wanted by several packages in Debian. But because the Chromium source
1198 is
<a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
893448">not available as a build
1199 dependency
</a
>, it is not yet possible to upload CEF to Debian. I
1200 hope this will change in the future.
</p
>
1202 <p
>The reason I got involved is that
1203 <a href=
"https://frikanalen.no/
">the Norwegian open channel
1204 Frikanalen
</a
> is starting to use CasparCG for our HD playout, and I
1205 would like to have all the free software tools we use to run the TV
1206 channel available as packages from the Debian project. The last
1207 remaining piece in the puzzle is Open Broadcast Encoder, but it depend
1208 on quite a lot of patched libraries which would have to be included in
1209 Debian first.
</p
>
1211 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1212 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1213 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
1218 <title>Learn to program with Minetest on Debian
</title>
1219 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Learn_to_program_with_Minetest_on_Debian.html
</link>
1220 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Learn_to_program_with_Minetest_on_Debian.html
</guid>
1221 <pubDate>Sat,
15 Dec
2018 15:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1222 <description><p
>A fun way to learn how to program
1223 <a href=
"https://www.python.org/
">Python
</a
> is to follow the
1224 instructions in the book
1225 "<a href=
"https://nostarch.com/programwithminecraft
">Learn to program
1226 with Minecraft
</a
>", which introduces programming in Python to people
1227 who like to play with Minecraft. The book uses a Python library to
1228 talk to a TCP/IP socket with an API accepting build instructions and
1229 providing information about the current players in a Minecraft world.
1230 The TCP/IP API was first created for the Minecraft implementation for
1231 Raspberry Pi, and has since been ported to some server versions of
1232 Minecraft. The book contain recipes for those using Windows, MacOSX
1233 and Raspian. But a little known fact is that you can follow the same
1234 recipes using the free software construction game
1235 <a href=
"https://minetest.net/
">Minetest
</a
>.
</p
>
1237 <p
>There is
<a href=
"https://github.com/sprintingkiwi/pycraft_mod
">a
1238 Minetest module implementing the same API
</a
>, making it possible to
1239 use the Python programs coded to talk to Minecraft with Minetest too.
1241 <a href=
"https://ftp-master.debian.org/new/minetest-mod-pycraft_0.20%
2Bgit20180331.0376a0a%
2Bdfsg-
1.html
">uploaded
1242 this module
</a
> to Debian two weeks ago, and as soon as it clears the
1243 FTP masters NEW queue, learning to program Python with Minetest on
1244 Debian will be a simple
'apt install
' away. The Debian package is
1245 maintained as part of the Debian Games team, and
1246 <a href=
"https://salsa.debian.org/games-team/unfinished/minetest-mod-pycraft
">the
1247 packaging rules
</a
> are currently located under
'unfinished
' on
1250 <p
>You will most likely need to install several of the Minetest
1251 modules in Debian for the examples included with the library to work
1252 well, as there are several blocks used by the example scripts that are
1253 provided via modules in Minetest. Without the required blocks, a
1254 simple stone block is used instead. My initial testing with a analog
1255 clock did not get gold arms as instructed in the python library, but
1256 instead used stone arms.
</p
>
1258 <p
>I tried to find a way to add the API to the desktop version of
1259 Minecraft, but were unable to find any working recipes. The
1260 <a href=
"https://www.epiphanydigest.com/tag/minecraft-python-api/
">recipes
</a
>
1261 I
<a href=
"https://github.com/kbsriram/mcpiapi
">found
</a
> are only
1262 working with a standalone Minecraft server setup. Are there any
1263 options to use with the normal desktop version?
</p
>
1265 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1266 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1267 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
1272 <title>Non-blocking bittorrent plugin for vlc
</title>
1273 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Non_blocking_bittorrent_plugin_for_vlc.html
</link>
1274 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Non_blocking_bittorrent_plugin_for_vlc.html
</guid>
1275 <pubDate>Wed,
12 Dec
2018 07:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1276 <description><p
>A few hours ago, a new and improved version (
2.4) of
1277 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/vlc-plugin-bittorrent
">the VLC
1278 bittorrent plugin
</a
> was uploaded to Debian. This new version
1279 include a complete rewrite of the bittorrent related code, which seem
1280 to make the plugin non-blocking. This mean you can actually exit VLC
1281 even when the plugin seem to be unable to get the bittorrent streaming
1282 started. The new version also include support for filtering playlist
1283 by file extension using command line options, if you want to avoid
1284 processing audio, video or images. The package is currently in Debian
1285 unstable, but should be available in Debian testing in two days. To
1286 test it, simply install it like this:
</p
>
1288 <p
><pre
>
1289 apt install vlc-plugin-bittorrent
1290 </pre
></p
>
1292 <p
>After it is installed, you can try to use it to play a file
1293 downloaded live via bittorrent like this:
1295 <p
><pre
>
1296 vlc https://archive.org/download/Glass_201703/Glass_201703_archive.torrent
1297 </pre
></p
>
1299 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1300 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1301 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
1306 <title>Why is your site not using Content Security Policy / CSP?
</title>
1307 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_is_your_site_not_using_Content_Security_Policy___CSP_.html
</link>
1308 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_is_your_site_not_using_Content_Security_Policy___CSP_.html
</guid>
1309 <pubDate>Sun,
9 Dec
2018 15:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1310 <description><p
>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of watching on Frikanalen the OWASP
1311 talk by Scott Helme titled
1312 "<a href=
"https://frikanalen.no/video/
626080/
">What We’ve Learned From
1313 Billions of Security Reports
</a
>". I had not heard of the
1314 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Security_Policy
">Content
1315 Security Policy standard
</a
> nor its ability to
"call home
" when a
1316 browser detect a policy breach (I do not follow web page design
1317 development much these days), and found the talk very illuminating.
</p
>
1319 <p
>The mechanism allow a web site owner to use HTTP headers to tell
1320 visitors web browser which sources (internal and external) are allowed to
1321 be used on the web site. Thus it become possible to enforce a
"only
1322 local content
" policy despite web designers urge to fetch programs
1323 from random sites on the Internet, like the one
1324 <a href=
"https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/
68966/hacking/browsealoud-plugin-hack.html
">enabling
1325 the attack
</a
> reported by Scott Helme earlier this year.
</p
>
1327 <p
>Using CSP seem like an obvious thing for a site admin to implement
1328 to take some control over the information leak that occur when
1329 external sources are used to render web pages, it is a mystery more
1330 sites are not using CSP? It is being
1331 <a href=
"https://www.w3.org/TR/CSP/
">standardized under W3C
</a
> these
1332 days, and is supposed by most web browsers
</p
>
1334 <p
>I managed to find
<a href=
"https://github.com/mozilla/django-csp
">a
1335 Django middleware for implementing CSP
</a
> and was happy to discover
1336 it was already in Debian. I plan to use it to add CSP support to the
1337 Frikanalen web site soon.
</p
>
1339 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1340 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1341 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
1346 <title>New and improved Frikanalen Kodi addon version
0.0.3</title>
1347 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_and_improved_Frikanalen_Kodi_addon_version_0_0_3.html
</link>
1348 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_and_improved_Frikanalen_Kodi_addon_version_0_0_3.html
</guid>
1349 <pubDate>Thu,
8 Nov
2018 10:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1350 <description><p
>If you read my blog regularly, you probably know I am involved in
1351 running and developing the
<a href=
"https://frikanalen.no/
">Norwegian
1352 TV channel Frikanalen
</a
>. It is an open channel, allowing everyone
1353 in Norway to publish videos on a TV channel with national coverage.
1354 You can think of it as Youtube for national television.
1355 In addition to distribution on RiksTV and Uninett, Frikanalen is also
1356 available as a Kodi addon. The last few days I have updated the code
1357 to add more features. A
1358 <a href=
"https://kodi.tv/addon/plugins-video-add-ons/frikanalen-nett-tv
">new
1359 and improved version
0.0.3 Frikanalen addon
</a
> was just made
1360 available via the Kodi repositories. This new version include a
1361 option to browse videos by category, as well as free text search
1362 in the video archive. It will now also show the video duration in the
1363 video lists, which were missing earlier. A new and experimental
1364 link to the HD video stream currently being worked on is provided, for
1365 those that want to see what the
<a href=
"https://casparcg.com/
">CasparCG
</a
>
1366 output look like. The alternative is the SD video stream, generated
1367 using MLT. CasparCG is controlled by our
1368 <a href=
"https://github.com/Frikanalen/mltplayout/
">mltplayout
1369 server
</a
> which instead of talking to mlt is giving PLAY instructions
1370 to the CasparCG server when it is time to start a new program.
</p
>
1372 <p
>By now, you are probably wondering what kind of content is being
1373 played on the channel. These days, it is filled with technical
1374 presentations like those from
<a href=
"https://www.nuug.no/
">NUUG
</a
>,
1375 <a href=
"https://www.debconf.org/
">Debconf
</a
>, Makercon, and TED,
1376 but there are also some periods with
1377 <a href=
"https://www.empo.no/
">EMPT TV
</a
> and
1378 <a href=
"https://www.p7.no/
">P7
</a
>.
1380 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1381 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1382 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
1387 <title>Time for an official MIME type for patches?
</title>
1388 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_an_official_MIME_type_for_patches_.html
</link>
1389 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_an_official_MIME_type_for_patches_.html
</guid>
1390 <pubDate>Thu,
1 Nov
2018 08:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1391 <description><p
>As part of my involvement in
1392 <a href=
"https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core
">the Nikita
1393 archive API project
</a
>, I
've been importing a fairly large lump of
1394 emails into a test instance of the archive to see how well this would
1395 go. I picked a subset of
<a href=
"https://notmuchmail.org/
">my
1396 notmuch email database
</a
>, all public emails sent to me via
1397 @lists.debian.org, giving me a set of around
216 000 emails to import.
1398 In the process, I had a look at the various attachments included in
1399 these emails, to figure out what to do with attachments, and noticed
1400 that one of the most common attachment formats do not have
1401 <a href=
"https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml
">an
1402 official MIME type
</a
> registered with IANA/IETF. The output from
1403 diff, ie the input for patch, is on the top
10 list of formats
1404 included in these emails. At the moment people seem to use either
1405 text/x-patch or text/x-diff, but neither is officially registered. It
1406 would be better if one official MIME type were registered and used
1407 everywhere.
</p
>
1409 <p
>To try to get one official MIME type for these files, I
've brought
1411 <a href=
"https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/media-types
">the
1412 media-types mailing list
</a
>. If you are interested in discussion
1413 which MIME type to use as the official for patch files, or involved in
1414 making software using a MIME type for patches, perhaps you would like
1415 to join the discussion?
</p
>
1417 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1418 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1419 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
1424 <title>Measuring the speaker frequency response using the AUDMES free software GUI - nice free software
</title>
1425 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_the_speaker_frequency_response_using_the_AUDMES_free_software_GUI___nice_free_software.html
</link>
1426 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_the_speaker_frequency_response_using_the_AUDMES_free_software_GUI___nice_free_software.html
</guid>
1427 <pubDate>Mon,
22 Oct
2018 08:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
1428 <description><p
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2018-
10-
22-audmes-measure-speakers.png
" align=
"right
" width=
"40%
"/
></p
>
1430 <p
>My current home stereo is a patchwork of various pieces I got on
1431 flee markeds over the years. It is amazing what kind of equipment
1432 show up there. I
've been wondering for a while if it was possible to
1433 measure how well this equipment is working together, and decided to
1434 see how far I could get using free software. After trawling the web I
1435 came across an article from DIY Audio and Video on
1436 <a href=
"https://www.diyaudioandvideo.com/Tutorial/SpeakerResponseTesting/
">Speaker
1437 Testing and Analysis
</a
> describing how to test speakers, and it listing
1438 several software options, among them
1439 <a href=
"https://sourceforge.net/projects/audmes/
">AUDio MEasurement
1440 System (AUDMES)
</a
>. It is the only free software system I could find
1441 focusing on measuring speakers and audio frequency response. In the
1442 process I also found an interesting article from NOVO on
1443 <a href=
"http://novo.press/understanding-speaker-specifications-and-frequency-response/
">Understanding
1444 Speaker Specifications and Frequency Response
</a
> and an article from
1446 <a href=
"https://www.ecoustics.com/articles/understanding-speaker-frequency-response/
">Understanding
1447 Speaker Frequency Response
</a
>, with a lot of information on what to
1448 look for and how to interpret the graphs. Armed with this knowledge,
1449 I set out to measure the state of my speakers.
</p
>
1451 <p
>The first hurdle was that AUDMES hadn
't seen a commit for
10 years
1452 and did not build with current compilers and libraries. I got in
1453 touch with its author, who no longer was spending time on the program
1454 but gave me write access to the subversion repository on Sourceforge.
1455 The end result is that now the code build on Linux and is capable of
1456 saving and loading the collected frequency response data in CSV
1457 format. The application is quite nice and flexible, and I was able to
1458 select the input and output audio interfaces independently. This made
1459 it possible to use a USB mixer as the input source, while sending
1460 output via my laptop headphone connection. I lacked the hardware and
1461 cabling to figure out a different way to get independent cabling to
1462 speakers and microphone.
</p
>
1464 <p
>Using this setup I could see how a large range of high frequencies
1465 apparently were not making it out of my speakers. The picture show
1466 the frequency response measurement of one of the speakers. Note the
1467 frequency lines seem to be slightly misaligned, compared to the CSV
1468 output from the program. I can not hear several of these are high
1469 frequencies, according to measurement from
1470 <a href=
"http://freehearingtestsoftware.com
">Free Hearing Test
1471 Software
</a
>, an freeware system to measure your hearing (still
1472 looking for a free software alternative), so I do not know if they are
1473 coming out out the speakers. I thus do not quite know how to figure
1474 out if the missing frequencies is a problem with the microphone, the
1475 amplifier or the speakers, but I managed to rule out the audio card in my
1476 PC by measuring my Bose noise canceling headset using its own
1477 microphone. This setup was able to see the high frequency tones, so
1478 the problem with my stereo had to be in the amplifier or speakers.
</p
>
1480 <p
>Anyway, to try to role out one factor I ended up picking up a new
1481 set of speakers at a flee marked, and these work a lot better than the
1482 old speakers, so I guess the microphone and amplifier is OK. If you
1483 need to measure your own speakers, check out AUDMES. If more people
1484 get involved, perhaps the project could become good enough to
1485 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
910876">include in Debian
</a
>? And if
1486 you know of some other free software to measure speakers and amplifier
1487 performance, please let me know. I am aware of the freeware option
1488 <a href=
"https://www.roomeqwizard.com/
">REW
</a
>, but I want something
1489 that can be developed also when the vendor looses interest.
</p
>
1491 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1492 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1493 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
1498 <title>Web browser integration of VLC with Bittorrent support
</title>
1499 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_browser_integration_of_VLC_with_Bittorrent_support.html
</link>
1500 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_browser_integration_of_VLC_with_Bittorrent_support.html
</guid>
1501 <pubDate>Sun,
21 Oct
2018 09:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
1502 <description><p
>Bittorrent is as far as I know, currently the most efficient way to
1503 distribute content on the Internet. It is used all by all sorts of
1504 content providers, from national TV stations like
1505 <a href=
"https://www.nrk.no/
">NRK
</a
>, Linux distributors like
1506 <a href=
"https://www.debian.org/
">Debian
</a
> and
1507 <a href=
"https://www.ubuntu.com/
">Ubuntu
</a
>, and of course the
1508 <a href=
"https://archive.org/
">Internet archive
</A
>.
1510 <p
>Almost a month ago
1511 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/vlc-plugin-bittorrent
">a new
1512 package adding Bittorrent support to VLC
</a
> became available in
1513 Debian testing and unstable. To test it, simply install it like
1516 <p
><pre
>
1517 apt install vlc-plugin-bittorrent
1518 </pre
></p
>
1520 <p
>Since the plugin was made available for the first time in Debian,
1521 several improvements have been made to it. In version
2.2-
4, now
1522 available in both testing and unstable, a desktop file is provided to
1523 teach browsers to start VLC when the user click on torrent files or
1524 magnet links. The last part is thanks to me finally understanding
1525 what the strange x-scheme-handler style MIME types in desktop files
1526 are used for. By adding x-scheme-handler/magnet to the MimeType entry
1527 in the desktop file, at least the browsers Firefox and Chromium will
1528 suggest to start VLC when selecting a magnet URI on a web page. The
1529 end result is that now, with the plugin installed in Buster and Sid,
1531 <a href=
"https://archive.org/details/CopyingIsNotTheft1080p
">Internet
1532 Archive page with movies
</a
> using a web browser and click on the
1533 torrent link to start streaming the movie.
</p
>
1535 <p
>Note, there is still some misfeatures in the plugin. One is the
1536 fact that it will hang and
1537 <a href=
"https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent/issues/
13">block VLC
1538 from exiting until the torrent streaming starts
</a
>. Another is the
1540 <a href=
"https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent/issues/
9">will pick
1541 and play a random file in a multi file torrent
</a
>. This is not
1542 always the video file you want. Combined with the first it can be a
1543 bit hard to get the video streaming going. But when it work, it seem
1544 to do a good job.
</p
>
1546 <p
>For the Debian packaging, I would love to find a good way to test
1547 if the plugin work with VLC using autopkgtest. I tried, but do not
1548 know enough of the inner workings of VLC to get it working. For now
1549 the autopkgtest script is only checking if the .so file was
1550 successfully loaded by VLC. If you have any suggestions, please
1551 submit a patch to the Debian bug tracking system.
</p
>
1553 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1554 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1555 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
1560 <title>Release
0.2 of free software archive system Nikita announced
</title>
1561 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Release_0_2_of_free_software_archive_system_Nikita_announced.html
</link>
1562 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Release_0_2_of_free_software_archive_system_Nikita_announced.html
</guid>
1563 <pubDate>Thu,
18 Oct
2018 14:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
1564 <description><p
>This morning, the new release of the
1565 <a href=
"https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core/
">Nikita
1566 Noark
5 core project
</a
> was
1567 <a href=
"https://lists.nuug.no/pipermail/nikita-noark/
2018-October/
000406.html
">announced
1568 on the project mailing list
</a
>. The free software solution is an
1569 implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark
5 used by
1570 government offices in Norway. These were the changes in version
0.2
1571 since version
0.1.1 (from NEWS.md):
1574 <li
>Fix typos in REL names
</li
>
1575 <li
>Tidy up error message reporting
</li
>
1576 <li
>Fix issue where we used Integer.valueOf(), not Integer.getInteger()
</li
>
1577 <li
>Change some String handling to StringBuffer
</li
>
1578 <li
>Fix error reporting
</li
>
1579 <li
>Code tidy-up
</li
>
1580 <li
>Fix issue using static non-synchronized SimpleDateFormat to avoid
1581 race conditions
</li
>
1582 <li
>Fix problem where deserialisers were treating integers as strings
</li
>
1583 <li
>Update methods to make them null-safe
</li
>
1584 <li
>Fix many issues reported by coverity
</li
>
1585 <li
>Improve equals(), compareTo() and hash() in domain model
</li
>
1586 <li
>Improvements to the domain model for metadata classes
</li
>
1587 <li
>Fix CORS issues when downloading document
</li
>
1588 <li
>Implementation of case-handling with registryEntry and document upload
</li
>
1589 <li
>Better support in Javascript for OPTIONS
</li
>
1590 <li
>Adding concept description of mail integration
</li
>
1591 <li
>Improve setting of default values for GET on ny-journalpost
</li
>
1592 <li
>Better handling of required values during deserialisation
</li
>
1593 <li
>Changed tilknyttetDato (M620) from date to dateTime
</li
>
1594 <li
>Corrected some opprettetDato (M600) (de)serialisation errors.
</li
>
1595 <li
>Improve parse error reporting.
</li
>
1596 <li
>Started on OData search and filtering.
</li
>
1597 <li
>Added Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct to project.
</li
>
1598 <li
>Moved repository and project from Github to Gitlab.
</li
>
1599 <li
>Restructured repository, moved code into src/ and web/.
</li
>
1600 <li
>Updated code to use Spring Boot version
2.
</li
>
1601 <li
>Added support for OAuth2 authentication.
</li
>
1602 <li
>Fixed several bugs discovered by Coverity.
</li
>
1603 <li
>Corrected handling of date/datetime fields.
</li
>
1604 <li
>Improved error reporting when rejecting during deserializatoin.
</li
>
1605 <li
>Adjusted default values provided for ny-arkivdel, ny-mappe,
1606 ny-saksmappe, ny-journalpost and ny-dokumentbeskrivelse.
</li
>
1607 <li
>Several fixes for korrespondansepart*.
</li
>
1608 <li
>Updated web GUI:
1610 <li
>Now handle both file upload and download.
</li
>
1611 <li
>Uses new OAuth2 authentication for login.
</li
>
1612 <li
>Forms now fetches default values from API using GET.
</li
>
1613 <li
>Added RFC
822 (email), TIFF and JPEG to list of possible file formats.
</li
>
1614 </ul
></li
>
1617 <p
>The changes and improvements are extensive. Running diffstat on
1618 the changes between git tab
0.1.1 and
0.2 show
1098 files changed,
1619 108666 insertions(+),
54066 deletions(-).
</p
>
1621 <p
>If free and open standardized archiving API sound interesting to
1622 you, please contact us on IRC
1623 (
<a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/%
23nikita
">#nikita on
1624 irc.freenode.net
</a
>) or email
1625 (
<a href=
"https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark
">nikita-noark
1626 mailing list
</a
>).
</p
>
1628 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1629 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1630 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
1635 <title>Fetching trusted timestamps using the rfc3161ng python module
</title>
1636 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fetching_trusted_timestamps_using_the_rfc3161ng_python_module.html
</link>
1637 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fetching_trusted_timestamps_using_the_rfc3161ng_python_module.html
</guid>
1638 <pubDate>Mon,
8 Oct
2018 12:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
1639 <description><p
>I have earlier covered the basics of trusted timestamping using the
1640 'openssl ts
' client. See blog post for
1641 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html
">2014</a
>,
1642 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/syslog_trusted_timestamp___chain_of_trusted_timestamps_for_your_syslog.html
">2016</a
>
1644 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_trusted_timestamps_in_a_Noark_5_archive.html
">2017</a
>
1645 for those stories. But some times I want to integrate the timestamping
1646 in other code, and recently I needed to integrate it into Python.
1647 After searching a bit, I found
1648 <a href=
"https://dev.entrouvert.org/projects/python-rfc3161
">the
1649 rfc3161 library
</a
> which seemed like a good fit, but I soon
1650 discovered it only worked for python version
2, and I needed something
1651 that work with python version
3. Luckily I next came across
1652 <a href=
"https://github.com/trbs/rfc3161ng/
">the rfc3161ng library
</a
>,
1653 a fork of the original rfc3161 library. Not only is it working with
1654 python
3, it have fixed a few of the bugs in the original library, and
1655 it has an active maintainer. I decided to wrap it up and make it
1656 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/python-rfc3161ng
">available in
1657 Debian
</a
>, and a few days ago it entered Debian unstable and testing.
</p
>
1659 <p
>Using the library is fairly straight forward. The only slightly
1660 problematic step is to fetch the required certificates to verify the
1661 timestamp. For some services it is straight forward, while for others
1662 I have not yet figured out how to do it. Here is a small standalone
1663 code example based on of the integration tests in the library code:
</p
>
1670 Python
3 script demonstrating how to use the rfc3161ng module to
1671 get trusted timestamps.
1673 The license of this code is the same as the license of the rfc3161ng
1674 library, ie MIT/BSD.
1679 import pyasn1.codec.der
1683 import urllib.request
1690 def fetch(url, f=None):
1691 response = urllib.request.urlopen(url)
1692 data = response.read()
1698 with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() as cert_f,\
1699 tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() as ca_f,\
1700 tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() as msg_f,\
1701 tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() as tsr_f:
1703 # First fetch certificates used by service
1704 certificate_data = fetch(
'https://freetsa.org/files/tsa.crt
', cert_f)
1705 ca_data_data = fetch(
'https://freetsa.org/files/cacert.pem
', ca_f)
1707 # Then timestamp the message
1709 rfc3161ng.RemoteTimestamper(
'http://freetsa.org/tsr
',
1710 certificate=certificate_data)
1711 data = b
"Python forever!\n
"
1712 tsr = timestamper(data=data, return_tsr=True)
1714 # Finally, convert message and response to something
'openssl ts
' can verify
1716 store(tsr_f, pyasn1.codec.der.encoder.encode(tsr))
1717 args = [
"openssl
",
"ts
",
"-verify
",
1718 "-data
", msg_f.name,
1719 "-in
", tsr_f.name,
1720 "-CAfile
", ca_f.name,
1721 "-untrusted
", cert_f.name]
1722 subprocess.check_call(args)
1724 if
'__main__
' == __name__:
1728 <p
>The code fetches the required certificates, store them as temporary
1729 files, timestamp a simple message, store the message and timestamp to
1730 disk and ask
'openssl ts
' to verify the timestamp. A timestamp is
1731 around
1.5 kiB in size, and should be fairly easy to store for future
1734 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1735 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1736 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
1741 <title>Automatic Google Drive sync using grive in Debian
</title>
1742 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Google_Drive_sync_using_grive_in_Debian.html
</link>
1743 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Google_Drive_sync_using_grive_in_Debian.html
</guid>
1744 <pubDate>Thu,
4 Oct
2018 15:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
1745 <description><p
>A few days, I rescued a Windows victim over to Debian. To try to
1746 rescue the remains, I helped set up automatic sync with Google Drive.
1747 I did not find any sensible Debian package handling this
1748 automatically, so I rebuild the grive2 source from
1749 <a href=
"http://www.webupd8.org/
">the Ubuntu UPD8 PPA
</a
> to do the
1750 task and added a autostart desktop entry and a small shell script to
1751 run in the background while the user is logged in to do the sync.
1752 Here is a sketch of the setup for future reference.
</p
>
1754 <p
>I first created
<tt
>~/googledrive
</tt
>, entered the directory and
1755 ran
'<tt
>grive -a
</tt
>' to authenticate the machine/user. Next, I
1756 created a autostart hook in
<tt
>~/.config/autostart/grive.desktop
</tt
>
1757 to start the sync when the user log in:
</p
>
1759 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
1761 Name=Google drive autosync
1763 Exec=/home/user/bin/grive-sync
1764 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
1766 <p
>Finally, I wrote the
<tt
>~/bin/grive-sync
</tt
> script to sync
1767 ~/googledrive/ with the files in Google Drive.
</p
>
1769 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
1774 if [
"$syncpid
" ] ; then
1778 trap cleanup EXIT INT QUIT
1779 /usr/lib/grive/grive-sync.sh listen googledrive
2>&1 | sed
"s%^%$
0:%
" &
1782 if ! xhost
>/dev/null
2>&1 ; then
1783 echo
"no DISPLAY, exiting as the user probably logged out
"
1786 if [ ! -e /run/user/
1000/grive-sync.sh_googledrive ] ; then
1787 /usr/lib/grive/grive-sync.sh sync googledrive
1790 done
2>&1 | sed
"s%^%$
0:%
"
1791 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
1793 <p
>Feel free to use the setup if you want. It can be assumed to be
1794 GNU GPL v2 licensed (or any later version, at your leisure), but I
1795 doubt this code is possible to claim copyright on.
</p
>
1797 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1798 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1799 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
1804 <title>Valutakrambod - A python and bitcoin love story
</title>
1805 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Valutakrambod___A_python_and_bitcoin_love_story.html
</link>
1806 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Valutakrambod___A_python_and_bitcoin_love_story.html
</guid>
1807 <pubDate>Sat,
29 Sep
2018 22:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
1808 <description><p
>It would come as no surprise to anyone that I am interested in
1809 bitcoins and virtual currencies. I
've been keeping an eye on virtual
1810 currencies for many years, and it is part of the reason a few months
1811 ago, I started writing a python library for collecting currency
1812 exchange rates and trade on virtual currency exchanges. I decided to
1813 name the end result valutakrambod, which perhaps can be translated to
1814 small currency shop.
</p
>
1816 <p
>The library uses the tornado python library to handle HTTP and
1817 websocket connections, and provide a asynchronous system for
1818 connecting to and tracking several services. The code is available
1820 <a href=
"http://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/valutakrambod
">github
</a
>.
</p
>
1822 </p
>There are two example clients of the library. One is very simple and
1823 list every updated buy/sell price received from the various services.
1824 This code is started by running bin/btc-rates and call the client code
1825 in valutakrambod/client.py. The simple client look like this:
</p
>
1827 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
1829 import tornado.ioloop
1830 import valutakrambod
1831 class SimpleClient(object):
1836 def newdata(self, service, pair, changed):
1837 print(
"%-
15s %s-%s: %
8.3f %
8.3f
" % (
1838 service.servicename(),
1841 service.rates[pair][
'ask
'],
1842 service.rates[pair][
'bid
'])
1844 async def refresh(self, service):
1845 await service.fetchRates(service.wantedpairs)
1847 self.ioloop = tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.current()
1848 self.services = valutakrambod.service.knownServices()
1849 for e in self.services:
1851 service.subscribe(self.newdata)
1852 stream = service.websocket()
1854 self.streams.append(stream)
1856 # Fetch information from non-streaming services immediately
1857 self.ioloop.call_later(len(self.services),
1858 functools.partial(self.refresh, service))
1859 # as well as regularly
1860 service.periodicUpdate(
60)
1861 for stream in self.streams:
1865 except KeyboardInterrupt:
1866 print(
"Interrupted by keyboard, closing all connections.
")
1868 for stream in self.streams:
1870 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
1872 <p
>The library client loops over all known
"public
" services,
1873 initialises it, subscribes to any updates from the service, checks and
1874 activates websocket streaming if the service provide it, and if no
1875 streaming is supported, fetches information from the service and sets
1876 up a periodic update every
60 seconds. The output from this client
1877 can look like this:
</p
>
1879 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
1880 Bl3p BTC-EUR:
5687.110 5653.690
1881 Bl3p BTC-EUR:
5687.110 5653.690
1882 Bl3p BTC-EUR:
5687.110 5653.690
1883 Hitbtc BTC-USD:
6594.560 6593.690
1884 Hitbtc BTC-USD:
6594.560 6593.690
1885 Bl3p BTC-EUR:
5687.110 5653.690
1886 Hitbtc BTC-USD:
6594.570 6593.690
1887 Bitstamp EUR-USD:
1.159 1.154
1888 Hitbtc BTC-USD:
6594.570 6593.690
1889 Hitbtc BTC-USD:
6594.580 6593.690
1890 Hitbtc BTC-USD:
6594.580 6593.690
1891 Hitbtc BTC-USD:
6594.580 6593.690
1892 Bl3p BTC-EUR:
5687.110 5653.690
1893 Paymium BTC-EUR:
5680.000 5620.240
1894 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
1896 <p
>The exchange order book is tracked in addition to the best buy/sell
1897 price, for those that need to know the details.
</p
>
1899 <p
>The other example client is focusing on providing a curses view
1900 with updated buy/sell prices as soon as they are received from the
1901 services. This code is located in bin/btc-rates-curses and activated
1902 by using the
'-c
' argument. Without the argument the
"curses
" output
1903 is printed without using curses, which is useful for debugging. The
1904 curses view look like this:
</p
>
1906 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
1907 Name Pair Bid Ask Spr Ftcd Age
1908 BitcoinsNorway BTCEUR
5591.8400 5711.0800 2.1%
16 nan
60
1909 Bitfinex BTCEUR
5671.0000 5671.2000 0.0%
16 22 59
1910 Bitmynt BTCEUR
5580.8000 5807.5200 3.9%
16 41 60
1911 Bitpay BTCEUR
5663.2700 nan nan%
15 nan
60
1912 Bitstamp BTCEUR
5664.8400 5676.5300 0.2%
0 1 1
1913 Bl3p BTCEUR
5653.6900 5684.9400 0.5%
0 nan
19
1914 Coinbase BTCEUR
5600.8200 5714.9000 2.0%
15 nan nan
1915 Kraken BTCEUR
5670.1000 5670.2000 0.0%
14 17 60
1916 Paymium BTCEUR
5620.0600 5680.0000 1.1%
1 7515 nan
1917 BitcoinsNorway BTCNOK
52898.9700 54034.6100 2.1%
16 nan
60
1918 Bitmynt BTCNOK
52960.3200 54031.1900 2.0%
16 41 60
1919 Bitpay BTCNOK
53477.7833 nan nan%
16 nan
60
1920 Coinbase BTCNOK
52990.3500 54063.0600 2.0%
15 nan nan
1921 MiraiEx BTCNOK
52856.5300 54100.6000 2.3%
16 nan nan
1922 BitcoinsNorway BTCUSD
6495.5300 6631.5400 2.1%
16 nan
60
1923 Bitfinex BTCUSD
6590.6000 6590.7000 0.0%
16 23 57
1924 Bitpay BTCUSD
6564.1300 nan nan%
15 nan
60
1925 Bitstamp BTCUSD
6561.1400 6565.6200 0.1%
0 2 1
1926 Coinbase BTCUSD
6504.0600 6635.9700 2.0%
14 nan
117
1927 Gemini BTCUSD
6567.1300 6573.0700 0.1%
16 89 nan
1928 Hitbtc+BTCUSD
6592.6200 6594.2100 0.0%
0 0 0
1929 Kraken BTCUSD
6565.2000 6570.9000 0.1%
15 17 58
1930 Exchangerates EURNOK
9.4665 9.4665 0.0%
16 107789 nan
1931 Norgesbank EURNOK
9.4665 9.4665 0.0%
16 107789 nan
1932 Bitstamp EURUSD
1.1537 1.1593 0.5%
4 5 1
1933 Exchangerates EURUSD
1.1576 1.1576 0.0%
16 107789 nan
1934 BitcoinsNorway LTCEUR
1.0000 49.0000 98.0%
16 nan nan
1935 BitcoinsNorway LTCNOK
492.4800 503.7500 2.2%
16 nan
60
1936 BitcoinsNorway LTCUSD
1.0221 49.0000 97.9%
15 nan nan
1937 Norgesbank USDNOK
8.1777 8.1777 0.0%
16 107789 nan
1938 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
1940 <p
>The code for this client is too complex for a simple blog post, so
1941 you will have to check out the git repository to figure out how it
1942 work. What I can tell is how the three last numbers on each line
1943 should be interpreted. The first is how many seconds ago information
1944 was received from the service. The second is how long ago, according
1945 to the service, the provided information was updated. The last is an
1946 estimate on how often the buy/sell values change.
</p
>
1948 <p
>If you find this library useful, or would like to improve it, I
1949 would love to hear from you. Note that for some of the services I
've
1950 implemented a trading API. It might be the topic of a future blog
1953 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1954 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1955 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
1960 <title>VLC in Debian now can do bittorrent streaming
</title>
1961 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/VLC_in_Debian_now_can_do_bittorrent_streaming.html
</link>
1962 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/VLC_in_Debian_now_can_do_bittorrent_streaming.html
</guid>
1963 <pubDate>Mon,
24 Sep
2018 21:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
1964 <description><p
>Back in February, I got curious to see
1965 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_VLC_to_stream_bittorrent_sources.html
">if
1966 VLC now supported Bittorrent streaming
</a
>. It did not, despite the
1967 fact that the idea and code to handle such streaming had been floating
1968 around for years. I did however find
1969 <a href=
"https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent
">a standalone plugin
1970 for VLC
</a
> to do it, and half a year later I decided to wrap up the
1971 plugin and get it into Debian. I uploaded it to NEW a few days ago,
1972 and am very happy to report that it
1973 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/vlc-plugin-bittorrent
">entered
1974 Debian
</a
> a few hours ago, and should be available in Debian/Unstable
1975 tomorrow, and Debian/Testing in a few days.
</p
>
1977 <p
>With the vlc-plugin-bittorrent package installed you should be able
1978 to stream videos using a simple call to
</p
>
1980 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
1981 vlc https://archive.org/download/TheGoat/TheGoat_archive.torrent
1982 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
1984 </p
>It can handle magnet links too. Now if only native vlc had
1985 bittorrent support. Then a lot more would be helping each other to
1986 share public domain and creative commons movies. The plugin need some
1987 stability work with seeking and picking the right file in a torrent
1988 with many files, but is already usable. Please note that the plugin
1989 is not removing downloaded files when vlc is stopped, so it can fill
1990 up your disk if you are not careful. Have fun. :)
</p
>
1992 <p
>I would love to get help maintaining this package. Get in touch if
1993 you are interested.
</p
>
1995 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1996 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1997 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
2002 <title>Using the Kodi API to play Youtube videos
</title>
2003 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_the_Kodi_API_to_play_Youtube_videos.html
</link>
2004 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_the_Kodi_API_to_play_Youtube_videos.html
</guid>
2005 <pubDate>Sun,
2 Sep
2018 23:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2006 <description><p
>I continue to explore my Kodi installation, and today I wanted to
2007 tell it to play a youtube URL I received in a chat, without having to
2008 insert search terms using the on-screen keyboard. After searching the
2009 web for API access to the Youtube plugin and testing a bit, I managed
2010 to find a recipe that worked. If you got a kodi instance with its API
2011 available from http://kodihost/jsonrpc, you can try the following to
2012 have check out a nice cover band.
</p
>
2014 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>curl --silent --header
'Content-Type: application/json
' \
2015 --data-binary
'{
"id
":
1,
"jsonrpc
":
"2.0",
"method
":
"Player.Open
",
2016 "params
": {
"item
": {
"file
":
2017 "plugin://plugin.video.youtube/play/?video_id=LuRGVM9O0qg
" } } }
' \
2018 http://projector.local/jsonrpc
</pre
></blockquote
></p
>
2020 <p
>I
've extended kodi-stream program to take a video source as its
2021 first argument. It can now handle direct video links, youtube links
2022 and
'desktop
' to stream my desktop to Kodi. It is almost like a
2023 Chromecast. :)
</p
>
2025 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2026 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2027 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
2032 <title>Software created using taxpayers’ money should be Free Software
</title>
2033 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_created_using_taxpayers__money_should_be_Free_Software.html
</link>
2034 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_created_using_taxpayers__money_should_be_Free_Software.html
</guid>
2035 <pubDate>Thu,
30 Aug
2018 13:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2036 <description><p
>It might seem obvious that software created using tax money should
2037 be available for everyone to use and improve. Free Software
2038 Foundation Europe recentlystarted a campaign to help get more people
2039 to understand this, and I just signed the petition on
2040 <a href=
"https://publiccode.eu/
">Public Money, Public Code
</a
> to help
2041 them. I hope you too will do the same.
</p
>
2046 <title>A bit more on privacy respecting health monitor / fitness tracker
</title>
2047 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_bit_more_on_privacy_respecting_health_monitor___fitness_tracker.html
</link>
2048 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_bit_more_on_privacy_respecting_health_monitor___fitness_tracker.html
</guid>
2049 <pubDate>Mon,
13 Aug
2018 09:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2050 <description><p
>A few days ago, I wondered if there are any privacy respecting
2051 health monitors and/or fitness trackers available for sale these days.
2052 I would like to buy one, but do not want to share my personal data
2053 with strangers, nor be forced to have a mobile phone to get data out
2054 of the unit. I
've received some ideas, and would like to share them
2057 One interesting data point was a pointer to a Free Software app for
2059 <a href=
"https://github.com/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge/
">Gadgetbridge
</a
>.
2060 It provide cloudless collection and storing of data from a variety of
2062 <a href=
"https://github.com/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge/#supported-devices
">list
2063 of supported devices
</a
> is a good indicator for units where the
2064 protocol is fairly open, as it is obviously being handled by Free
2065 Software. Other units are reportedly encrypting the collected
2066 information with their own public key, making sure only the vendor
2067 cloud service is able to extract data from the unit. The people
2068 contacting me about Gadgetbirde said they were using
2069 <a href=
"https://us.amazfit.com/shop/bip?variant=
336750">Amazfit
2071 <a href=
"http://www.xiaomimi6phone.com/xiaomi-mi-band-
3-features-release-date-rumors/
">Xiaomi
2072 Band
3</a
>.
</p
>
2074 <p
>I also got a suggestion to look at some of the units from Garmin.
2075 I was told their GPS watches can be connected via USB and show up as a
2076 USB storage device with
2077 <a href=
"https://www.gpsbabel.org/htmldoc-development/fmt_garmin_fit.html
">Garmin
2078 FIT files
</a
> containing the collected measurements. While
2079 proprietary, FIT files apparently can be read at least by
2080 <a href=
"https://www.gpsbabel.org
">GPSBabel
</a
> and the
2081 <a href=
"https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/gpxpod
">GpxPod
</a
> Nextcloud
2082 app. It is unclear to me if they can read step count and heart rate
2083 data. The person I talked to was using a
2084 <a href=
"https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/
564291">Garmin Forerunner
2085 935</a
>, which is a fairly expensive unit. I doubt it is worth it for
2086 a unit where the vendor clearly is trying its best to move from open
2087 to closed systems. I still remember when Garmin dropped NMEA support
2088 in its GPSes.
</p
>
2090 <p
>A final idea was to build ones own unit, perhaps by basing it on a
2091 wearable hardware platforms like
2092 <a href=
"https://learn.adafruit.com/flora-geo-watch
">the Flora Geo
2093 Watch
</a
>. Sound like fun, but I had more money than time to spend on
2094 the topic, so I suspect it will have to wait for another time.
</p
>
2096 <p
>While I was working on tracking down links, I came across an
2097 inspiring TED talk by Dave Debronkart about
2098 <a href=
"https://archive.org/details/DavedeBronkart_2010X
">being a
2099 e-patient
</a
>, and discovered the web site
2100 <a href=
"https://participatorymedicine.org/epatients/
">Participatory
2101 Medicine
</a
>. If you too want to track your own health and fitness
2102 without having information about your private life floating around on
2103 computers owned by others, I recommend checking it out.
</p
>
2105 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2106 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2107 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
2112 <title>Privacy respecting health monitor / fitness tracker?
</title>
2113 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Privacy_respecting_health_monitor___fitness_tracker_.html
</link>
2114 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Privacy_respecting_health_monitor___fitness_tracker_.html
</guid>
2115 <pubDate>Tue,
7 Aug
2018 16:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2116 <description><p
>Dear lazyweb,
</p
>
2118 <p
>I wonder, is there a fitness tracker / health monitor available for
2119 sale today that respect the users privacy? With this I mean a
2120 watch/bracelet capable of measuring pulse rate and other
2121 fitness/health related values (and by all means, also the correct time
2122 and location if possible), which is
<strong
>only
</strong
> provided for
2123 me to extract/read from the unit with computer without a radio beacon
2124 and Internet connection. In other words, it do not depend on a cell
2125 phone app, and do make the measurements available via other peoples
2126 computer (aka
"the cloud
"). The collected data should be available
2127 using only free software. I
'm not interested in depending on some
2128 non-free software that will leave me high and dry some time in the
2129 future. I
've been unable to find any such unit. I would like to buy
2130 it. The ones I have seen for sale here in Norway are proud to report
2131 that they share my health data with strangers (aka
"cloud enabled
").
2132 Is there an alternative? I
'm not interested in giving money to people
2133 requiring me to accept
"privacy terms
" to allow myself to measure my
2134 own health.
</p
>
2136 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2137 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2138 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
2143 <title>Sharing images with friends and family using RSS and EXIF/XMP metadata
</title>
2144 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sharing_images_with_friends_and_family_using_RSS_and_EXIF_XMP_metadata.html
</link>
2145 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sharing_images_with_friends_and_family_using_RSS_and_EXIF_XMP_metadata.html
</guid>
2146 <pubDate>Tue,
31 Jul
2018 23:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2147 <description><p
>For a while now, I have looked for a sensible way to share images
2148 with my family using a self hosted solution, as it is unacceptable to
2149 place images from my personal life under the control of strangers
2150 working for data hoarders like Google or Dropbox. The last few days I
2151 have drafted an approach that might work out, and I would like to
2152 share it with you. I would like to publish images on a server under
2153 my control, and point some Internet connected display units using some
2154 free and open standard to the images I published. As my primary
2155 language is not limited to ASCII, I need to store metadata using
2156 UTF-
8. Many years ago, I hoped to find a digital photo frame capable
2157 of reading a RSS feed with image references (aka using the
2158 &lt;enclosure
&gt; RSS tag), but was unable to find a current supplier
2159 of such frames. In the end I gave up that approach.
</p
>
2161 <p
>Some months ago, I discovered that
2162 <a href=
"https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/
">XScreensaver
</a
> is able to
2163 read images from a RSS feed, and used it to set up a screen saver on
2164 my home info screen, showing images from the Daily images feed from
2165 NASA. This proved to work well. More recently I discovered that
2166 <a href=
"https://kodi.tv
">Kodi
</a
> (both using
2167 <a href=
"https://www.openelec.tv/
">OpenELEC
</a
> and
2168 <a href=
"https://libreelec.tv
">LibreELEC
</a
>) provide the
2169 <a href=
"https://github.com/grinsted/script.screensaver.feedreader
">Feedreader
</a
>
2170 screen saver capable of reading a RSS feed with images and news. For
2171 fun, I used it this summer to test Kodi on my parents TV by hooking up
2172 a Raspberry PI unit with LibreELEC, and wanted to provide them with a
2173 screen saver showing selected pictures from my selection.
</p
>
2175 <p
>Armed with motivation and a test photo frame, I set out to generate
2176 a RSS feed for the Kodi instance. I adjusted my
<a
2177 href=
"https://freedombox.org/
">Freedombox
</a
> instance, created
2178 /var/www/html/privatepictures/, wrote a small Perl script to extract
2179 title and description metadata from the photo files and generate the
2180 RSS file. I ended up using Perl instead of python, as the
2181 libimage-exiftool-perl Debian package seemed to handle the EXIF/XMP
2182 tags I ended up using, while python3-exif did not. The relevant EXIF
2183 tags only support ASCII, so I had to find better alternatives. XMP
2184 seem to have the support I need.
</p
>
2186 <p
>I am a bit unsure which EXIF/XMP tags to use, as I would like to
2187 use tags that can be easily added/updated using normal free software
2188 photo managing software. I ended up using the tags set using this
2189 exiftool command, as these tags can also be set using digiKam:
</p
>
2191 <blockquote
><pre
>
2192 exiftool -headline=
'The RSS image title
' \
2193 -description=
'The RSS image description.
' \
2194 -subject+=for-family photo.jpeg
2195 </pre
></blockquote
>
2197 <p
>I initially tried the
"-title
" and
"keyword
" tags, but they were
2198 invisible in digiKam, so I changed to
"-headline
" and
"-subject
". I
2199 use the keyword/subject
'for-family
' to flag that the photo should be
2200 shared with my family. Images with this keyword set are located and
2201 copied into my Freedombox for the RSS generating script to find.
</p
>
2203 <p
>Are there better ways to do this? Get in touch if you have better
2204 suggestions.
</p
>
2206 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2207 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2208 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
2213 <title>Simple streaming the Linux desktop to Kodi using GStreamer and RTP
</title>
2214 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simple_streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_GStreamer_and_RTP.html
</link>
2215 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simple_streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_GStreamer_and_RTP.html
</guid>
2216 <pubDate>Thu,
12 Jul
2018 17:
55:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2217 <description><p
>Last night, I wrote
2218 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html
">a
2219 recipe to stream a Linux desktop using VLC to a instance of Kodi
</a
>.
2220 During the day I received valuable feedback, and thanks to the
2221 suggestions I have been able to rewrite the recipe into a much simpler
2222 approach requiring no setup at all. It is a single script that take
2223 care of it all.
</p
>
2225 <p
>This new script uses GStreamer instead of VLC to capture the
2226 desktop and stream it to Kodi. This fixed the video quality issue I
2227 saw initially. It further removes the need to add a m3u file on the
2228 Kodi machine, as it instead connects to
2229 <a href=
"https://kodi.wiki/view/JSON-RPC_API/v8
">the JSON-RPC API in
2230 Kodi
</a
> and simply ask Kodi to play from the stream created using
2231 GStreamer. Streaming the desktop to Kodi now become trivial. Copy
2232 the script below, run it with the DNS name or IP address of the kodi
2233 server to stream to as the only argument, and watch your screen show
2234 up on the Kodi screen. Note, it depend on multicast on the local
2235 network, so if you need to stream outside the local network, the
2236 script must be modified. Also note, I have no idea if audio work, as
2237 I only care about the picture part.
</p
>
2239 <blockquote
><pre
>
2242 # Stream the Linux desktop view to Kodi. See
2243 # http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html
2244 # for backgorund information.
2246 # Make sure the stream is stopped in Kodi and the gstreamer process is
2247 # killed if something go wrong (for example if curl is unable to find the
2248 # kodi server). Do the same when interrupting this script.
2252 params=
"$
3"
2253 curl --silent --header
'Content-Type: application/json
' \
2254 --data-binary
"{ \
"id\
":
1, \
"jsonrpc\
": \
"2.0\
", \
"method\
": \
"$cmd\
", \
"params\
": $params }
" \
2255 "http://$host/jsonrpc
"
2258 if [ -n
"$kodihost
" ] ; then
2259 # Stop the playing when we end
2260 playerid=$(kodicmd
"$kodihost
" Player.GetActivePlayers
"{}
" |
2261 jq .result[].playerid)
2262 kodicmd
"$kodihost
" Player.Stop
"{ \
"playerid\
" : $playerid }
" > /dev/null
2264 if [
"$gstpid
" ]
&& kill -
0 "$gstpid
" >/dev/null
2>&1; then
2265 kill
"$gstpid
"
2268 trap cleanup EXIT INT
2270 if [ -n
"$
1" ]; then
2281 pasrc=$(pactl list | grep -A2
'Source #
' | grep
'Name: .*\.monitor$
' | \
2282 cut -d
" " -f2|head -
1)
2283 gst-launch-
1.0 ximagesrc use-damage=
0 ! video/x-raw,framerate=
30/
1 ! \
2284 videoconvert ! queue2 ! \
2285 x264enc bitrate=
8000 speed-preset=superfast tune=zerolatency qp-min=
30 \
2286 key-int-max=
15 bframes=
2 ! video/x-h264,profile=high ! queue2 ! \
2287 mpegtsmux alignment=
7 name=mux ! rndbuffersize max=
1316 min=
1316 ! \
2288 udpsink host=$mcast port=$mcastport ttl-mc=$mcastttl auto-multicast=
1 sync=
0 \
2289 pulsesrc device=$pasrc ! audioconvert ! queue2 ! avenc_aac ! queue2 ! mux. \
2290 > /dev/null
2>&1 &
2293 # Give stream a second to get going
2296 # Ask kodi to start streaming using its JSON-RPC API
2297 kodicmd
"$kodihost
" Player.Open \
2298 "{\
"item\
": { \
"file\
": \
"udp://@$mcast:$mcastport\
" } }
" > /dev/null
2300 # wait for gst to end
2301 wait
"$gstpid
"
2302 </pre
></blockquote
>
2304 <p
>I hope you find the approach useful. I know I do.
</p
>
2306 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2307 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2308 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
2313 <title>Streaming the Linux desktop to Kodi using VLC and RTSP
</title>
2314 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html
</link>
2315 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html
</guid>
2316 <pubDate>Thu,
12 Jul
2018 02:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2317 <description><p
>PS: See
2318 <ahref=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simple_streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_GStreamer_and_RTP.html
">the
2319 followup post
</a
> for a even better approach.
</p
>
2321 <p
>A while back, I was asked by a friend how to stream the desktop to
2322 my projector connected to Kodi. I sadly had to admit that I had no
2323 idea, as it was a task I never had tried. Since then, I have been
2324 looking for a way to do so, preferable without much extra software to
2325 install on either side. Today I found a way that seem to kind of
2326 work. Not great, but it is a start.
</p
>
2328 <p
>I had a look at several approaches, for example
2329 <a href=
"https://github.com/mfoetsch/dlna_live_streaming
">using uPnP
2330 DLNA as described in
2011</a
>, but it required a uPnP server, fuse and
2331 local storage enough to store the stream locally. This is not going
2332 to work well for me, lacking enough free space, and it would
2333 impossible for my friend to get working.
</p
>
2335 <p
>Next, it occurred to me that perhaps I could use VLC to create a
2336 video stream that Kodi could play. Preferably using
2337 broadcast/multicast, to avoid having to change any setup on the Kodi
2338 side when starting such stream. Unfortunately, the only recipe I
2339 could find using multicast used the rtp protocol, and this protocol
2340 seem to not be supported by Kodi.
</p
>
2342 <p
>On the other hand, the rtsp protocol is working! Unfortunately I
2343 have to specify the IP address of the streaming machine in both the
2344 sending command and the file on the Kodi server. But it is showing my
2345 desktop, and thus allow us to have a shared look on the big screen at
2346 the programs I work on.
</p
>
2348 <p
>I did not spend much time investigating codeces. I combined the
2349 rtp and rtsp recipes from
2350 <a href=
"https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Streaming_HowTo/Command_Line_Examples/
">the
2351 VLC Streaming HowTo/Command Line Examples
</a
>, and was able to get
2352 this working on the desktop/streaming end.
</p
>
2354 <blockquote
><pre
>
2355 vlc screen:// --sout \
2356 '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=
800,ab=
128}:rtp{dst=projector.local,port=
1234,sdp=rtsp://
192.168.11.4:
8080/test.sdp}
'
2357 </pre
></blockquote
>
2359 <p
>I ssh-ed into my Kodi box and created a file like this with the
2360 same IP address:
</p
>
2362 <blockquote
><pre
>
2363 echo rtsp://
192.168.11.4:
8080/test.sdp \
2364 > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
2365 </pre
></blockquote
>
2367 <p
>Note the
192.168.11.4 IP address is my desktops IP address. As far
2368 as I can tell the IP must be hardcoded for this to work. In other
2369 words, if someone elses machine is going to do the steaming, you have
2370 to update screenstream.m3u on the Kodi machine and adjust the vlc
2371 recipe. To get started, locate the file in Kodi and select the m3u
2372 file while the VLC stream is running. The desktop then show up in my
2373 big screen. :)
</p
>
2375 <p
>When using the same technique to stream a video file with audio,
2376 the audio quality is really bad. No idea if the problem is package
2377 loss or bad parameters for the transcode. I do not know VLC nor Kodi
2378 enough to tell.
</p
>
2380 <p
><strong
>Update
2018-
07-
12</strong
>: Johannes Schauer send me a few
2381 succestions and reminded me about an important step. The
"screen:
"
2382 input source is only available once the vlc-plugin-access-extra
2383 package is installed on Debian. Without it, you will see this error
2384 message:
"VLC is unable to open the MRL
'screen://
'. Check the log
2385 for details.
" He further found that it is possible to drop some parts
2386 of the VLC command line to reduce the amount of hardcoded information.
2387 It is also useful to consider using cvlc to avoid having the VLC
2388 window in the desktop view. In sum, this give us this command line on
2391 <blockquote
><pre
>
2392 cvlc screen:// --sout \
2393 '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=
800,ab=
128}:rtp{sdp=rtsp://:
8080/}
'
2394 </pre
></blockquote
>
2396 <p
>and this on the Kodi end
<p
>
2398 <blockquote
><pre
>
2399 echo rtsp://
192.168.11.4:
8080/ \
2400 > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
2401 </pre
></blockquote
>
2403 <p
>Still bad image quality, though. But I did discover that streaming
2404 a DVD using dvdsimple:///dev/dvd as the source had excellent video and
2405 audio quality, so I guess the issue is in the input or transcoding
2406 parts, not the rtsp part. I
've tried to change the vb and ab
2407 parameters to use more bandwidth, but it did not make a
2408 difference.
</p
>
2410 <p
>I further received a suggestion from Einar Haraldseid to try using
2411 gstreamer instead of VLC, and this proved to work great! He also
2412 provided me with the trick to get Kodi to use a multicast stream as
2413 its source. By using this monstrous oneliner, I can stream my desktop
2414 with good video quality in reasonable framerate to the
239.255.0.1
2415 multicast address on port
1234:
2417 <blockquote
><pre
>
2418 gst-launch-
1.0 ximagesrc use-damage=
0 ! video/x-raw,framerate=
30/
1 ! \
2419 videoconvert ! queue2 ! \
2420 x264enc bitrate=
8000 speed-preset=superfast tune=zerolatency qp-min=
30 \
2421 key-int-max=
15 bframes=
2 ! video/x-h264,profile=high ! queue2 ! \
2422 mpegtsmux alignment=
7 name=mux ! rndbuffersize max=
1316 min=
1316 ! \
2423 udpsink host=
239.255.0.1 port=
1234 ttl-mc=
1 auto-multicast=
1 sync=
0 \
2424 pulsesrc device=$(pactl list | grep -A2
'Source #
' | \
2425 grep
'Name: .*\.monitor$
' | cut -d
" " -f2|head -
1) ! \
2426 audioconvert ! queue2 ! avenc_aac ! queue2 ! mux.
2427 </pre
></blockquote
>
2429 <p
>and this on the Kodi end
<p
>
2431 <blockquote
><pre
>
2432 echo udp://@
239.255.0.1:
1234 \
2433 > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
2434 </pre
></blockquote
>
2436 <p
>Note the trick to pick a valid pulseaudio source. It might not
2437 pick the one you need. This approach will of course lead to trouble
2438 if more than one source uses the same multicast port and address.
2439 Note the ttl-mc=
1 setting, which limit the multicast packages to the
2440 local network. If the value is increased, your screen will be
2441 broadcasted further, one network
"hop
" for each increase (read up on
2442 multicast to learn more. :)!
</p
>
2444 <p
>Having cracked how to get Kodi to receive multicast streams, I
2445 could use this VLC command to stream to the same multicast address.
2446 The image quality is way better than the rtsp approach, but gstreamer
2447 seem to be doing a better job.
</p
>
2449 <blockquote
><pre
>
2450 cvlc screen:// --sout
'#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=
800,ab=
128}:rtp{mux=ts,dst=
239.255.0.1,port=
1234,sdp=sap}
'
2451 </pre
></blockquote
>
2453 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2454 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2455 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
2460 <title>What is the most supported MIME type in Debian in
2018?
</title>
2461 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_in_2018_.html
</link>
2462 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_in_2018_.html
</guid>
2463 <pubDate>Mon,
9 Jul
2018 08:
05:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2464 <description><p
>Five years ago,
2465 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html
">I
2466 measured what the most supported MIME type in Debian was
</a
>, by
2467 analysing the desktop files in all packages in the archive. Since
2468 then, the DEP-
11 AppStream system has been put into production, making
2469 the task a lot easier. This made me want to repeat the measurement,
2470 to see how much things changed. Here are the new numbers, for
2471 unstable only this time:
2473 <p
><strong
>Debian Unstable:
</strong
></p
>
2477 ----- -----------------------
2489 30 audio/x-vorbis+ogg
2490 29 image/x-portable-pixmap
2492 27 image/x-portable-bitmap
2494 26 application/x-ogg
2500 <p
>The list was created like this using a sid chroot:
"cat
2501 /var/lib/apt/lists/*sid*_dep11_Components-amd64.yml.gz| zcat | awk
'/^
2502 - \S+\/\S+$/ {print $
2 }
' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -
20"</p
>
2504 <p
>It is interesting to see how image formats have passed text/plain
2505 as the most announced supported MIME type. These days, thanks to the
2506 AppStream system, if you run into a file format you do not know, and
2507 want to figure out which packages support the format, you can find the
2508 MIME type of the file using
"file --mime
&lt;filename
&gt;
", and then
2509 look up all packages announcing support for this format in their
2510 AppStream metadata (XML or .desktop file) using
"appstreamcli
2511 what-provides mimetype
&lt;mime-type
&gt;. For example if you, like
2512 me, want to know which packages support inode/directory, you can get a
2513 list like this:
</p
>
2515 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
2516 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype inode/directory | grep Package: | sort
2523 Package: doublecmd-common
2525 Package: enlightenment
2545 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
2547 <p
>Using the same method, I can quickly discover that the Sketchup file
2548 format is not yet supported by any package in Debian:
</p
>
2550 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
2551 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype application/vnd.sketchup.skp
2552 Could not find component providing
'mimetype::application/vnd.sketchup.skp
'.
2554 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
2556 <p
>Yesterday I used it to figure out which packages support the STL
3D
2559 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
2560 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype application/sla|grep Package
2565 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
2567 <p
>PS: A new version of Cura was uploaded to Debian yesterday.
</p
>
2569 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2570 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2571 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
2576 <title>Debian APT upgrade without enough free space on the disk...
</title>
2577 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_APT_upgrade_without_enough_free_space_on_the_disk___.html
</link>
2578 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_APT_upgrade_without_enough_free_space_on_the_disk___.html
</guid>
2579 <pubDate>Sun,
8 Jul
2018 12:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2580 <description><p
>Quite regularly, I let my Debian Sid/Unstable chroot stay untouch
2581 for a while, and when I need to update it there is not enough free
2582 space on the disk for apt to do a normal
'apt upgrade
'. I normally
2583 would resolve the issue by doing
'apt install
&lt;somepackages
&gt;
' to
2584 upgrade only some of the packages in one batch, until the amount of
2585 packages to download fall below the amount of free space available.
2586 Today, I had about
500 packages to upgrade, and after a while I got
2587 tired of trying to install chunks of packages manually. I concluded
2588 that I did not have the spare hours required to complete the task, and
2589 decided to see if I could automate it. I came up with this small
2590 script which I call
'apt-in-chunks
':
</p
>
2592 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
2595 # Upgrade packages when the disk is too full to upgrade every
2596 # upgradable package in one lump. Fetching packages to upgrade using
2597 # apt, and then installing using dpkg, to avoid changing the package
2598 # flag for manual/automatic.
2603 if [
"$
1" ]; then
2604 grep -v
"$
1"
2610 for p in $(apt list --upgradable | ignore
"$@
" |cut -d/ -f1 | grep -v
'^Listing...
'); do
2611 echo
"Upgrading $p
"
2613 apt install --download-only -y $p
2614 for f in /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb; do
2615 if [ -e
"$f
" ]; then
2616 dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb
2621 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
2623 <p
>The script will extract the list of packages to upgrade, try to
2624 download the packages needed to upgrade one package, install the
2625 downloaded packages using dpkg. The idea is to upgrade packages
2626 without changing the APT mark for the package (ie the one recording of
2627 the package was manually requested or pulled in as a dependency). To
2628 use it, simply run it as root from the command line. If it fail, try
2629 'apt install -f
' to clean up the mess and run the script again. This
2630 might happen if the new packages conflict with one of the old
2631 packages. dpkg is unable to remove, while apt can do this.
</p
>
2633 <p
>It take one option, a package to ignore in the list of packages to
2634 upgrade. The option to ignore a package is there to be able to skip
2635 the packages that are simply too large to unpack. Today this was
2636 'ghc
', but I have run into other large packages causing similar
2637 problems earlier (like TeX).
</p
>
2639 <p
>Update
2018-
07-
08: Thanks to Paul Wise, I am aware of two
2640 alternative ways to handle this. The
"unattended-upgrades
2641 --minimal-upgrade-steps
" option will try to calculate upgrade sets for
2642 each package to upgrade, and then upgrade them in order, smallest set
2643 first. It might be a better option than my above mentioned script.
2644 Also,
"aptutude upgrade
" can upgrade single packages, thus avoiding
2645 the need for using
"dpkg -i
" in the script above.
</p
>
2647 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2648 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2649 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
2654 <title>The worlds only stone power plant?
</title>
2655 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_worlds_only_stone_power_plant_.html
</link>
2656 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_worlds_only_stone_power_plant_.html
</guid>
2657 <pubDate>Sat,
30 Jun
2018 10:
35:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2658 <description><p
>So far, at least hydro-electric power, coal power, wind power,
2659 solar power, and wood power are well known. Until a few days ago, I
2660 had never heard of stone power. Then I learn about a quarry in a
2662 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremanger
">Bremanger
</a
> i
2664 <a href=
"https://www.bontrup.com/en/activities/raw-materials/bremanger-quarry/
">the
2665 Bremanger Quarry
</a
> company is extracting stone and dumping the stone
2666 into a shaft leading to its shipping harbour. This downward movement
2667 in this shaft is used to produce electricity. In short, it is using
2668 falling rocks instead of falling water to produce electricity, and
2669 according to its own statements it is producing more power than it is
2670 using, and selling the surplus electricity to the Norwegian power
2671 grid. I find the concept truly amazing. Is this the worlds only
2672 stone power plant?
</p
>
2674 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2675 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2676 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
2681 <title>Add-on to control the projector from within Kodi
</title>
2682 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Add_on_to_control_the_projector_from_within_Kodi.html
</link>
2683 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Add_on_to_control_the_projector_from_within_Kodi.html
</guid>
2684 <pubDate>Tue,
26 Jun
2018 23:
55:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2685 <description><p
>My movie playing setup involve
<a href=
"https://kodi.tv/
">Kodi
</a
>,
2686 <a href=
"https://openelec.tv
">OpenELEC
</a
> (probably soon to be
2687 replaced with
<a href=
"https://libreelec.tv/
">LibreELEC
</a
>) and an
2688 Infocus IN76 video projector. My projector can be controlled via both
2689 a infrared remote controller, and a RS-
232 serial line. The vendor of
2690 my projector,
<a href=
"https://www.infocus.com/
">InFocus
</a
>, had been
2691 sensible enough to document the serial protocol in its user manual, so
2692 it is easily available, and I used it some years ago to write
2693 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/infocus-projector-control
">a
2694 small script to control the projector
</a
>. For a while now, I longed
2695 for a setup where the projector was controlled by Kodi, for example in
2696 such a way that when the screen saver went on, the projector was
2697 turned off, and when the screen saver exited, the projector was turned
2700 <p
>A few days ago, with very good help from parts of my family, I
2701 managed to find a Kodi Add-on for controlling a Epson projector, and
2702 got in touch with its author to see if we could join forces and make a
2703 Add-on with support for several projectors. To my pleasure, he was
2704 positive to the idea, and we set out to add InFocus support to his
2705 add-on, and make the add-on suitable for the official Kodi add-on
2706 repository.
</p
>
2708 <p
>The Add-on is now working (for me, at least), with a few minor
2709 adjustments. The most important change I do relative to the master
2710 branch in the github repository is embedding the
2711 <a href=
"https://github.com/pyserial/pyserial
">pyserial module
</a
> in
2712 the add-on. The long term solution is to make a
"script
" type
2713 pyserial module for Kodi, that can be pulled in as a dependency in
2714 Kodi. But until that in place, I embed it.
</p
>
2716 <p
>The add-on can be configured to turn on the projector when Kodi
2717 starts, off when Kodi stops as well as turn the projector off when the
2718 screensaver start and on when the screesaver stops. It can also be
2719 told to set the projector source when turning on the projector.
2721 <p
>If this sound interesting to you, check out
2722 <a href=
"https://github.com/fredrik-eriksson/kodi_projcontrol
">the
2723 project github repository
</a
>. Perhaps you can send patches to
2724 support your projector too? As soon as we find time to wrap up the
2725 latest changes, it should be available for easy installation using any
2726 Kodi instance.
</p
>
2728 <p
>For future improvements, I would like to add projector model
2729 detection and the ability to adjust the brightness level of the
2730 projector from within Kodi. We also need to figure out how to handle
2731 the cooling period of the projector. My projector refuses to turn on
2732 for
60 seconds after it was turned off. This is not handled well by
2733 the add-on at the moment.
</p
>
2735 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2736 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2737 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
2742 <title>Self-appointed leaders of the Free World
</title>
2743 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Self_appointed_leaders_of_the_Free_World.html
</link>
2744 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Self_appointed_leaders_of_the_Free_World.html
</guid>
2745 <pubDate>Thu,
22 Mar
2018 11:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
2746 <description><p
>The leaders of the worlds have started to congratulate the
2747 re-elected Russian head of state, and this causes some criticism. I
2748 am though a little fascinated by a comment from USA senator John McCain,
2749 <a href=
"http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/
379339-mccain-rips-trumps-congratulatory-call-to-putin-as-insult-to-russian-people
">sited
2750 by The Hill and others
</a
>:
2752 <p
><blockquote
>
2753 <p
>"An American president does not lead the Free World by
2754 congratulating dictators on winning sham elections.
"</p
>
2755 </blockquote
></p
>
2757 <p
>While I totally agree with the senator here, the way the quote is
2758 phrased make me suspect that he is unaware of the simple fact that USA
2759 have not lead the Free World since at least before its government
2760 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maher_Arar
">kidnapped a
2761 completely innocent Canadian citizen in transit on his way home to
2762 Canada via John F. Kennedy International Airport in September
2002 and
2763 sent him to be tortured in Syria for a year
</a
>.
</p
>
2765 <p
>USA might be running ahead, but the path they are taking is not the
2766 one taken by any Free World.
</p
>
2771 <title>Facebooks ability to sell your personal information is the real Cambridge Analytica scandal
</title>
2772 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Facebooks_ability_to_sell_your_personal_information_is_the_real_Cambridge_Analytica_scandal.html
</link>
2773 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Facebooks_ability_to_sell_your_personal_information_is_the_real_Cambridge_Analytica_scandal.html
</guid>
2774 <pubDate>Wed,
21 Mar
2018 16:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
2775 <description><p
>So, Cambridge Analytica is getting some well deserved criticism for
2776 (mis)using information it got from Facebook about
50 million people,
2777 mostly in the USA. What I find a bit surprising, is how little
2778 criticism Facebook is getting for handing the information over to
2779 Cambridge Analytica and others in the first place. And what about the
2780 people handing their private and personal information to Facebook?
2781 And last, but not least, what about the government offices who are
2782 handing information about the visitors of their web pages to Facebook?
2783 No-one who looked at the terms of use of Facebook should be surprised
2784 that information about peoples interests, political views, personal
2785 lifes and whereabouts would be sold by Facebook.
</p
>
2787 <p
>What I find to be the real scandal is the fact that Facebook is
2788 selling your personal information, not that one of the buyers used it
2789 in a way Facebook did not approve when exposed. It is well known that
2790 Facebook is selling out their users privacy, but a scandal
2791 nevertheless. Of course the information provided to them by Facebook
2792 would be misused by one of the parties given access to personal
2793 information about the millions of Facebook users. Collected
2794 information will be misused sooner or later. The only way to avoid
2795 such misuse, is to not collect the information in the first place. If
2796 you do not want Facebook to hand out information about yourself for
2797 the use and misuse of its customers, do not give Facebook the
2798 information.
</p
>
2800 <p
>Personally, I would recommend to completely remove your Facebook
2801 account, and take back some control of your personal information.
2802 <a href=
"https://www.theguardian.com/technology/
2018/mar/
19/how-to-protect-your-facebook-privacy-or-delete-yourself-completely
">According
2803 to The Guardian
</a
>, it is a bit hard to find out how to request
2804 account removal (and not just
'disabling
'). You need to
2805 <a href=
"https://www.facebook.com/help/
224562897555674?helpref=faq_content
">visit
2806 a specific Facebook page
</a
> and click on
'let us know
' on that page
2807 to get to
<a href=
"https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account
">the
2808 real account deletion screen
</a
>. Perhaps something to consider? I
2809 would not trust the information to really be deleted (who knows,
2810 perhaps NSA, GCHQ and FRA already got a copy), but it might reduce the
2811 exposure a bit.
</p
>
2813 <p
>If you want to learn more about the capabilities of Cambridge
2814 Analytica, I recommend to see the video recording of the one hour talk
2815 Paul-Olivier Dehaye gave to
<a href=
"">NUUG
</a
> last april about
2816 <a href=
"https://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20170404-big-data-psychometric/
">
2817 Data collection, psychometric profiling and their impact on
2818 politics
</a
>.
</p
>
2820 <p
>And if you want to communicate with your friends and loved ones,
2821 use some end-to-end encrypted method like
2822 <a href=
"https://www.signal.org/
">Signal
</a
> or
2823 <a href=
"https://ring.cx/
">Ring
</a
>, and stop sharing your private
2824 messages with strangers like Facebook and Google.
</p
>
2829 <title>First rough draft Norwegian and Spanish edition of the book Made with Creative Commons
</title>
2830 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_rough_draft_Norwegian_and_Spanish_edition_of_the_book_Made_with_Creative_Commons.html
</link>
2831 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_rough_draft_Norwegian_and_Spanish_edition_of_the_book_Made_with_Creative_Commons.html
</guid>
2832 <pubDate>Tue,
13 Mar
2018 13:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
2833 <description><p
>I am working on publishing yet another book related to Creative
2834 Commons. This time it is a book filled with interviews and histories
2835 from those around the globe making a living using Creative
2838 <p
>Yesterday, after many months of hard work by several volunteer
2839 translators, the first draft of a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the book
2840 <a href=
"https://madewith.cc
">Made with Creative Commons from
2017</a
>
2841 was complete. The Spanish translation is also complete, while the
2842 Dutch, Polish, German and Ukraine edition need a lot of work. Get in
2843 touch if you want to help make those happen, or would like to
2844 translate into your mother tongue.
</p
>
2846 <p
>The whole book project started when
2847 <a href=
"http://gwolf.org/node/
4102">Gunnar Wolf announced
</a
> that he
2848 was going to make a Spanish edition of the book. I noticed, and
2849 offered some input on how to make a book, based on my experience with
2851 <a href=
"https://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-
22441576.html
">Free
2852 Culture
</a
> and
2853 <a href=
"https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian
">The Debian
2854 Administrator
's Handbook
</a
> books to Norwegian Bokmål. To make a
2855 long story short, we ended up working on a Bokmål edition, and now the
2856 first rough translation is complete, thanks to the hard work of
2857 Ole-Erik Yrvin, Ingrid Yrvin, Allan Nordhøy and myself. The first
2858 proof reading is almost done, and only the second and third proof
2859 reading remains. We will also need to translate the
14 figures and
2860 create a book cover. Once it is done we will publish the book on
2861 paper, as well as in PDF, ePub and possibly Mobi formats.
</p
>
2863 <p
>The book itself originates as a manuscript on Google Docs, is
2864 downloaded as ODT from there and converted to Markdown using pandoc.
2865 The Markdown is modified by a script before is converted to DocBook
2866 using pandoc. The DocBook is modified again using a script before it
2867 is used to create a Gettext POT file for translators. The translated
2868 PO file is then combined with the earlier mentioned DocBook file to
2869 create a translated DocBook file, which finally is given to dblatex to
2870 create the final PDF. The end result is a set of editions of the
2871 manuscript, one English and one for each of the translations.
</p
>
2873 <p
>The translation is conducted using
2874 <a href=
"https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/madewithcc/translation/
">the
2875 Weblate web based translation system
</a
>. Please have a look there
2876 and get in touch if you would like to help out with proof
2877 reading. :)
</p
>
2879 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2880 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2881 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
2886 <title>Debian used in the subway info screens in Oslo, Norway
</title>
2887 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_used_in_the_subway_info_screens_in_Oslo__Norway.html
</link>
2888 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_used_in_the_subway_info_screens_in_Oslo__Norway.html
</guid>
2889 <pubDate>Fri,
2 Mar
2018 13:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
2890 <description><p
>Today I was pleasantly surprised to discover my operating system of
2891 choice, Debian, was used in the info screens on the subway stations.
2892 While passing Nydalen subway station in Oslo, Norway, I discovered the
2893 info screen booting with some text scrolling. I was not quick enough
2894 with my camera to be able to record a video of the scrolling boot
2895 screen, but I did get a photo from when the boot got stuck with a
2896 corrupt file system:
2898 <p align=
"center
"><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2018-
03-
02-ruter-debian-lenny.jpeg
"><img align=
"center
" width=
"40%
" src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2018-
03-
02-ruter-debian-lenny.jpeg
" alt=
"[photo of subway info screen]
"></a
></p
>
2900 <p
>While I am happy to see Debian used more places, some details of the
2901 content on the screen worries me.
</p
>
2903 <p
>The image show the version booting is
'Debian GNU/Linux lenny/sid
',
2904 indicating that this is based on code taken from Debian Unstable/Sid
2905 after Debian Etch (version
4) was released
2007-
04-
08 and before
2906 Debian Lenny (version
5) was released
2009-
02-
14. Since Lenny Debian
2907 has released version
6 (Squeeze)
2011-
02-
06,
7 (Wheezy)
2013-
05-
04,
8
2908 (Jessie)
2015-
04-
25 and
9 (Stretch)
2017-
06-
15, according to
2909 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history
">a Debian
2910 version history on Wikpedia
</a
>. This mean the system is running
2911 around
10 year old code, with no security fixes from the vendor for
2912 many years.
</p
>
2914 <p
>This is not the first time I discover the Oslo subway company,
2915 Ruter, running outdated software. In
2012,
2916 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Er_billettautomatene_til_kollektivtrafikken_i_Oslo_uten_sikkerhetsoppdateringer_.html
">I
2917 discovered the ticket vending machines were running Windows
2000</a
>,
2919 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fortsatt_ingen_sikkerhetsoppdateringer_for_billettautomatene_til_kollektivtrafikken_i_Oslo_.html
">still
2920 the case in
2016</a
>. Given the response from the responsible people
2921 in
2016, I would assume the machines are still running unpatched
2922 Windows
2000. Thus, an unpatched Debian setup come as no surprise.
</p
>
2924 <p
>The photo is made available under the license terms
2925 <a href=
"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/
">Creative Commons
2926 4.0 Attribution International (CC BY
4.0)
</a
>.
</p
>
2928 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2929 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2930 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
2935 <title>The SysVinit upstream project just migrated to git
</title>
2936 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_SysVinit_upstream_project_just_migrated_to_git.html
</link>
2937 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_SysVinit_upstream_project_just_migrated_to_git.html
</guid>
2938 <pubDate>Sun,
18 Feb
2018 09:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
2939 <description><p
>Surprising as it might sound, there are still computers using the
2940 traditional Sys V init system, and there probably will be until
2941 systemd start working on Hurd and FreeBSD.
2942 <a href=
"https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/sysvinit
">The upstream
2943 project still exist
</a
>, though, and up until today, the upstream
2944 source was available from Savannah via subversion. I am happy to
2945 report that this just changed.
</p
>
2947 <p
>The upstream source is now in Git, and consist of three
2948 repositories:
</p
>
2952 <li
><a href=
"http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/sysvinit.git
">sysvinit
</a
></li
>
2953 <li
><a href=
"http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/sysvinit/insserv.git
">insserv
</a
></li
>
2954 <li
><a href=
"http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/sysvinit/startpar.git
">startpar
</a
></li
>
2958 <p
>I do not really spend much time on the project these days, and I
2959 has mostly retired, but found it best to migrate the source to a good
2960 version control system to help those willing to move it forward.
</p
>
2962 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2963 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2964 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
2969 <title>Using VLC to stream bittorrent sources
</title>
2970 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_VLC_to_stream_bittorrent_sources.html
</link>
2971 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_VLC_to_stream_bittorrent_sources.html
</guid>
2972 <pubDate>Wed,
14 Feb
2018 08:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
2973 <description><p
>A few days ago, a new major version of
2974 <a href=
"https://www.videolan.org/
">VLC
</a
> was announced, and I
2975 decided to check out if it now supported streaming over
2976 <a href=
"http://bittorrent.org/
">bittorrent
</a
> and
2977 <a href=
"https://webtorrent.io
">webtorrent
</a
>. Bittorrent is one of
2978 the most efficient ways to distribute large files on the Internet, and
2979 Webtorrent is a variant of Bittorrent using
2980 <a href=
"https://webrtc.org
">WebRTC
</a
> as its transport channel,
2981 allowing web pages to stream and share files using the same technique.
2982 The network protocols are similar but not identical, so a client
2983 supporting one of them can not talk to a client supporting the other.
2984 I was a bit surprised with what I discovered when I started to look.
2986 <a href=
"https://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/
3.0.0.html
">the release
2987 notes
</a
> did not help answering this question, so I started searching
2988 the web. I found several news articles from
2013, most of them
2989 tracing the news from Torrentfreak
2990 (
"<a href=https://torrentfreak.com/open-source-giant-vlc-mulls-bittorrent-support-
130211/
">Open
2991 Source Giant VLC Mulls BitTorrent Streaming Support
</a
>"), about a
2992 initiative to pay someone to create a VLC patch for bittorrent
2993 support. To figure out what happend with this initiative, I headed
2994 over to the #videolan IRC channel and asked if there were some bug or
2995 feature request tickets tracking such feature. I got an answer from
2996 lead developer Jean-Babtiste Kempf, telling me that there was a patch
2997 but neither he nor anyone else knew where it was. So I searched a bit
2998 more, and came across an independent
2999 <a href=
"https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent
">VLC plugin to add
3000 bittorrent support
</a
>, created by Johan Gunnarsson in
2016/
2017.
3001 Again according to Jean-Babtiste, this is not the patch he was talking
3004 <p
>Anyway, to test the plugin, I made a working Debian package from
3005 the git repository, with some modifications. After installing this
3006 package, I could stream videos from
3007 <a href=
"https://www.archive.org/
">The Internet Archive
</a
> using VLC
3008 commands like this:
</p
>
3010 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
3011 vlc https://archive.org/download/LoveNest/LoveNest_archive.torrent
3012 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
3014 <p
>The plugin is supposed to handle magnet links too, but since The
3015 Internet Archive do not have magnet links and I did not want to spend
3016 time tracking down another source, I have not tested it. It can take
3017 quite a while before the video start playing without any indication of
3018 what is going on from VLC. It took
10-
20 seconds when I measured it.
3019 Some times the plugin seem unable to find the correct video file to
3020 play, and show the metadata XML file name in the VLC status line. I
3021 have no idea why.
</p
>
3023 <p
>I have created a
<a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
890360">request for
3024 a new package in Debian (RFP)
</a
> and
3025 <a href=
"https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent/issues/
1">asked if
3026 the upstream author is willing to help make this happen
</a
>. Now we
3027 wait to see what come out of this. I do not want to maintain a
3028 package that is not maintained upstream, nor do I really have time to
3029 maintain more packages myself, so I might leave it at this. But I
3030 really hope someone step up to do the packaging, and hope upstream is
3031 still maintaining the source. If you want to help, please update the
3032 RFP request or the upstream issue.
</p
>
3034 <p
>I have not found any traces of webtorrent support for VLC.
</p
>
3036 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3037 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3038 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
3043 <title>Version
3.1 of Cura, the
3D print slicer, is now in Debian
</title>
3044 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Version_3_1_of_Cura__the_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian.html
</link>
3045 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Version_3_1_of_Cura__the_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian.html
</guid>
3046 <pubDate>Tue,
13 Feb
2018 06:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
3047 <description><p
>A new version of the
3048 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura
">3D printer slicer
3049 software Cura
</a
>, version
3.1.0, is now available in Debian Testing
3050 (aka Buster) and Debian Unstable (aka Sid). I hope you find it
3051 useful. It was uploaded the last few days, and the last update will
3052 enter testing tomorrow. See the
3053 <a href=
"https://ultimaker.com/en/products/cura-software/release-notes
">release
3054 notes
</a
> for the list of bug fixes and new features. Version
3.2
3055 was announced
6 days ago. We will try to get it into Debian as
3058 <p
>More information related to
3D printing is available on the
3059 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/
3DPrinting
">3D printing
</a
> and
3060 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/
3D-printer
">3D printer
</a
> wiki pages
3061 in Debian.
</p
>
3063 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3064 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3065 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
3070 <title>How hard can æ, ø and å be?
</title>
3071 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_hard_can______and___be_.html
</link>
3072 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_hard_can______and___be_.html
</guid>
3073 <pubDate>Sun,
11 Feb
2018 17:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
3074 <description><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2018-
02-
11-peppes-unicode.jpeg
" align=
"right
"/
>
3076 <p
>We write
2018, and it is
30 years since Unicode was introduced.
3077 Most of us in Norway have come to expect the use of our alphabet to
3078 just work with any computer system. But it is apparently beyond reach
3079 of the computers printing recites at a restaurant. Recently I visited
3080 a Peppes pizza resturant, and noticed a few details on the recite.
3081 Notice how
'ø
' and
'å
' are replaced with strange symbols in
3082 'Servitør
',
'Å BETALE
',
'Beløp pr. gjest
',
'Takk for besøket.
' and
'Vi
3083 gleder oss til å se deg igjen
'.
</p
>
3085 <p
>I would say that this state is passed sad and over in embarrassing.
</p
>
3087 <p
>I removed personal and private information to be nice.
</p
>
3089 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3090 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3091 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
3096 <title>Legal to share more than
11,
000 movies listed on IMDB?
</title>
3097 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Legal_to_share_more_than_11_000_movies_listed_on_IMDB_.html
</link>
3098 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Legal_to_share_more_than_11_000_movies_listed_on_IMDB_.html
</guid>
3099 <pubDate>Sun,
7 Jan
2018 23:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
3100 <description><p
>I
've continued to track down list of movies that are legal to
3101 distribute on the Internet, and identified more than
11,
000 title IDs
3102 in The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) so far. Most of them (
57%) are
3103 feature films from USA published before
1923. I
've also tracked down
3104 more than
24,
000 movies I have not yet been able to map to IMDB title
3105 ID, so the real number could be a lot higher. According to the front
3106 web page for
<a href=
"https://retrofilmvault.com/
">Retro Film
3107 Vault
</A
>, there are
44,
000 public domain films, so I guess there are
3108 still some left to identify.
</p
>
3110 <p
>The complete data set is available from
3111 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb
">a
3112 public git repository
</a
>, including the scripts used to create it.
3113 Most of the data is collected using web scraping, for example from the
3114 "product catalog
" of companies selling copies of public domain movies,
3115 but any source I find believable is used. I
've so far had to throw
3116 out three sources because I did not trust the public domain status of
3117 the movies listed.
</p
>
3119 <p
>Anyway, this is the summary of the
28 collected data sources so
3122 <p
><pre
>
3123 2352 entries (
66 unique) with and
15983 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-search.json
3124 2302 entries (
120 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json
3125 195 entries (
63 unique) with and
200 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-cinemovies.json
3126 89 entries (
52 unique) with and
38 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-creative-commons.json
3127 344 entries (
28 unique) with and
655 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-fesfilm.json
3128 668 entries (
209 unique) with and
1064 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-filmchest-com.json
3129 830 entries (
21 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-icheckmovies-archive-mochard.json
3130 19 entries (
19 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-c-expired-gb.json
3131 6822 entries (
6669 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-c-expired-us.json
3132 137 entries (
0 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-externlist.json
3133 1205 entries (
57 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-pd.json
3134 84 entries (
20 unique) with and
167 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-infodigi-pd.json
3135 158 entries (
135 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-looney-tunes.json
3136 113 entries (
4 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-pd.json
3137 182 entries (
100 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-silent.json
3138 229 entries (
87 unique) with and
1 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-manual.json
3139 44 entries (
2 unique) with and
64 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-openflix.json
3140 291 entries (
33 unique) with and
474 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-profilms-pd.json
3141 211 entries (
7 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies-info.json
3142 1232 entries (
57 unique) with and
1875 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies-net.json
3143 46 entries (
13 unique) with and
81 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainreview.json
3144 698 entries (
64 unique) with and
118 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomaintorrents.json
3145 1758 entries (
882 unique) with and
3786 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-retrofilmvault.json
3146 16 entries (
0 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-thehillproductions.json
3147 63 entries (
16 unique) with and
141 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-vodo.json
3148 11583 unique IMDB title IDs in total,
8724 only in one list,
24647 without IMDB title ID
3149 </pre
></p
>
3151 <p
> I keep finding more data sources. I found the cinemovies source
3152 just a few days ago, and as you can see from the summary, it extended
3153 my list with
63 movies. Check out the mklist-* scripts in the git
3154 repository if you are curious how the lists are created. Many of the
3155 titles are extracted using searches on IMDB, where I look for the
3156 title and year, and accept search results with only one movie listed
3157 if the year matches. This allow me to automatically use many lists of
3158 movies without IMDB title ID references at the cost of increasing the
3159 risk of wrongly identify a IMDB title ID as public domain. So far my
3160 random manual checks have indicated that the method is solid, but I
3161 really wish all lists of public domain movies would include unique
3162 movie identifier like the IMDB title ID. It would make the job of
3163 counting movies in the public domain a lot easier.
</p
>
3165 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3166 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3167 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
3172 <title>Cura, the nice
3D print slicer, is now in Debian Unstable
</title>
3173 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cura__the_nice_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian_Unstable.html
</link>
3174 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cura__the_nice_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian_Unstable.html
</guid>
3175 <pubDate>Sun,
17 Dec
2017 07:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
3176 <description><p
>After several months of working and waiting, I am happy to report
3177 that the nice and user friendly
3D printer slicer software Cura just
3178 entered Debian Unstable. It consist of five packages,
3179 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura
">cura
</a
>,
3180 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura-engine
">cura-engine
</a
>,
3181 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libarcus
">libarcus
</a
>,
3182 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fdm-materials
">fdm-materials
</a
>,
3183 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libsavitar
">libsavitar
</a
> and
3184 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/uranium
">uranium
</a
>. The last
3185 two, uranium and cura, entered Unstable yesterday. This should make
3186 it easier for Debian users to print on at least the Ultimaker class of
3187 3D printers. My nearest
3D printer is an Ultimaker
2+, so it will
3188 make life easier for at least me. :)
</p
>
3190 <p
>The work to make this happen was done by Gregor Riepl, and I was
3191 happy to assist him in sponsoring the packages. With the introduction
3192 of Cura, Debian is up to three
3D printer slicers at your service,
3193 Cura, Slic3r and Slic3r Prusa. If you own or have access to a
3D
3194 printer, give it a go. :)
</p
>
3196 <p
>The
3D printer software is maintained by the
3D printer Debian
3197 team, flocking together on the
3198 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/
3dprinter-general
">3dprinter-general
</a
>
3199 mailing list and the
3200 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-
3dprinting
">#debian-
3dprinting
</a
>
3201 IRC channel.
</p
>
3203 <p
>The next step for Cura in Debian is to update the cura package to
3204 version
3.0.3 and then update the entire set of packages to version
3205 3.1.0 which showed up the last few days.
</p
>
3210 <title>Idea for finding all public domain movies in the USA
</title>
3211 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_finding_all_public_domain_movies_in_the_USA.html
</link>
3212 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_finding_all_public_domain_movies_in_the_USA.html
</guid>
3213 <pubDate>Wed,
13 Dec
2017 10:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
3214 <description><p
>While looking at
3215 <a href=
"http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/
">the scanned copies
3216 for the copyright renewal entries for movies published in the USA
</a
>,
3217 an idea occurred to me. The number of renewals are so few per year, it
3218 should be fairly quick to transcribe them all and add references to
3219 the corresponding IMDB title ID. This would give the (presumably)
3220 complete list of movies published
28 years earlier that did _not_
3221 enter the public domain for the transcribed year. By fetching the
3222 list of USA movies published
28 years earlier and subtract the movies
3223 with renewals, we should be left with movies registered in IMDB that
3224 are now in the public domain. For the year
1955 (which is the one I
3225 have looked at the most), the total number of pages to transcribe is
3226 21. For the
28 years from
1950 to
1978, it should be in the range
3227 500-
600 pages. It is just a few days of work, and spread among a
3228 small group of people it should be doable in a few weeks of spare
3231 <p
>A typical copyright renewal entry look like this (the first one
3232 listed for
1955):
</p
>
3234 <p
><blockquote
>
3235 ADAM AND EVIL, a photoplay in seven reels by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
3236 Distribution Corp. (c)
17Aug27; L24293. Loew
's Incorporated (PWH);
3238 </blockquote
></p
>
3240 <p
>The movie title as well as registration and renewal dates are easy
3241 enough to locate by a program (split on first comma and look for
3242 DDmmmYY). The rest of the text is not required to find the movie in
3243 IMDB, but is useful to confirm the correct movie is found. I am not
3244 quite sure what the L and R numbers mean, but suspect they are
3245 reference numbers into the archive of the US Copyright Office.
</p
>
3247 <p
>Tracking down the equivalent IMDB title ID is probably going to be
3248 a manual task, but given the year it is fairly easy to search for the
3249 movie title using for example
3250 <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
>.
3251 Using this search, I find that the equivalent IMDB title ID for the
3252 first renewal entry from
1955 is
3253 <a href=
"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017588/
">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017588/
</a
>.
</p
>
3255 <p
>I suspect the best way to do this would be to make a specialised
3256 web service to make it easy for contributors to transcribe and track
3257 down IMDB title IDs. In the web service, once a entry is transcribed,
3258 the title and year could be extracted from the text, a search in IMDB
3259 conducted for the user to pick the equivalent IMDB title ID right
3260 away. By spreading out the work among volunteers, it would also be
3261 possible to make at least two persons transcribe the same entries to
3262 be able to discover any typos introduced. But I will need help to
3263 make this happen, as I lack the spare time to do all of this on my
3264 own. If you would like to help, please get in touch. Perhaps you can
3265 draft a web service for crowd sourcing the task?
</p
>
3267 <p
>Note, Project Gutenberg already have some
3268 <a href=
"http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=copyright+office+renewals
">transcribed
3269 copies of the US Copyright Office renewal protocols
</a
>, but I have
3270 not been able to find any film renewals there, so I suspect they only
3271 have copies of renewal for written works. I have not been able to find
3272 any transcribed versions of movie renewals so far. Perhaps they exist
3273 somewhere?
</p
>
3275 <p
>I would love to figure out methods for finding all the public
3276 domain works in other countries too, but it is a lot harder. At least
3277 for Norway and Great Britain, such work involve tracking down the
3278 people involved in making the movie and figuring out when they died.
3279 It is hard enough to figure out who was part of making a movie, but I
3280 do not know how to automate such procedure without a registry of every
3281 person involved in making movies and their death year.
</p
>
3283 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3284 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3285 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
3290 <title>Is the short movie «Empty Socks» from
1927 in the public domain or not?
</title>
3291 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_the_short_movie__Empty_Socks__from_1927_in_the_public_domain_or_not_.html
</link>
3292 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_the_short_movie__Empty_Socks__from_1927_in_the_public_domain_or_not_.html
</guid>
3293 <pubDate>Tue,
5 Dec
2017 12:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
3294 <description><p
>Three years ago, a presumed lost animation film,
3295 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_Socks
">Empty Socks from
3296 1927</a
>, was discovered in the Norwegian National Library. At the
3297 time it was discovered, it was generally assumed to be copyrighted by
3298 The Walt Disney Company, and I blogged about
3299 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Opphavsretts_status_for__Empty_Socks__fra_1927_.html
">my
3300 reasoning to conclude
</a
> that it would would enter the Norwegian
3301 equivalent of the public domain in
2053, based on my understanding of
3302 Norwegian Copyright Law. But a few days ago, I came across
3303 <a href=
"http://www.toonzone.net/forums/threads/exposed-disneys-repurchase-of-oswald-the-rabbit-a-sham
.4792291/
">a
3304 blog post claiming the movie was already in the public domain
</a
>, at
3305 least in USA. The reasoning is as follows: The film was released in
3306 November or Desember
1927 (sources disagree), and presumably
3307 registered its copyright that year. At that time, right holders of
3308 movies registered by the copyright office received government
3309 protection for there work for
28 years. After
28 years, the copyright
3310 had to be renewed if the wanted the government to protect it further.
3311 The blog post I found claim such renewal did not happen for this
3312 movie, and thus it entered the public domain in
1956. Yet someone
3313 claim the copyright was renewed and the movie is still copyright
3314 protected. Can anyone help me to figure out which claim is correct?
3315 I have not been able to find Empty Socks in Catalog of copyright
3316 entries. Ser
.3 pt
.12-
13 v
.9-
12 1955-
1958 Motion Pictures
3317 <a href=
"http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/
1955r.html#film
">available
3318 from the University of Pennsylvania
</a
>, neither in
3319 <a href=
"https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp
.39015084451130;page=root;view=image;size=
100;seq=
83;num=
45">page
3320 45 for the first half of
1955</a
>, nor in
3321 <a href=
"https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp
.39015084451130;page=root;view=image;size=
100;seq=
175;num=
119">page
3322 119 for the second half of
1955</a
>. It is of course possible that
3323 the renewal entry was left out of the printed catalog by mistake. Is
3324 there some way to rule out this possibility? Please help, and update
3325 the wikipedia page with your findings.
3327 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3328 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3329 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
3334 <title>Metadata proposal for movies on the Internet Archive
</title>
3335 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Metadata_proposal_for_movies_on_the_Internet_Archive.html
</link>
3336 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Metadata_proposal_for_movies_on_the_Internet_Archive.html
</guid>
3337 <pubDate>Tue,
28 Nov
2017 12:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
3338 <description><p
>It would be easier to locate the movie you want to watch in
3339 <a href=
"https://www.archive.org/
">the Internet Archive
</a
>, if the
3340 metadata about each movie was more complete and accurate. In the
3341 archiving community, a well known saying state that good metadata is a
3342 love letter to the future. The metadata in the Internet Archive could
3343 use a face lift for the future to love us back. Here is a proposal
3344 for a small improvement that would make the metadata more useful
3345 today. I
've been unable to find any document describing the various
3346 standard fields available when uploading videos to the archive, so
3347 this proposal is based on my best quess and searching through several
3348 of the existing movies.
</p
>
3350 <p
>I have a few use cases in mind. First of all, I would like to be
3351 able to count the number of distinct movies in the Internet Archive,
3352 without duplicates. I would further like to identify the IMDB title
3353 ID of the movies in the Internet Archive, to be able to look up a IMDB
3354 title ID and know if I can fetch the video from there and share it
3355 with my friends.
</p
>
3357 <p
>Second, I would like the Butter data provider for The Internet
3359 (
<a href=
"https://github.com/butterproviders/butter-provider-archive
">available
3360 from github
</a
>), to list as many of the good movies as possible. The
3361 plugin currently do a search in the archive with the following
3362 parameters:
</p
>
3364 <p
><pre
>
3365 collection:moviesandfilms
3366 AND NOT collection:movie_trailers
3367 AND -mediatype:collection
3368 AND format:
"Archive BitTorrent
"
3370 </pre
></p
>
3372 <p
>Most of the cool movies that fail to show up in Butter do so
3373 because the
'year
' field is missing. The
'year
' field is populated by
3374 the year part from the
'date
' field, and should be when the movie was
3375 released (date or year). Two such examples are
3376 <a href=
"https://archive.org/details/SidneyOlcottsBen-hur1905
">Ben Hur
3377 from
1905</a
> and
3378 <a href=
"https://archive.org/details/Caminandes2GranDillama
">Caminandes
3379 2: Gran Dillama from
2013</a
>, where the year metadata field is
3382 So, my proposal is simply, for every movie in The Internet Archive
3383 where an IMDB title ID exist, please fill in these metadata fields
3384 (note, they can be updated also long after the video was uploaded, but
3385 as far as I can tell, only by the uploader):
3389 <dt
>mediatype
</dt
>
3390 <dd
>Should be
'movie
' for movies.
</dd
>
3392 <dt
>collection
</dt
>
3393 <dd
>Should contain
'moviesandfilms
'.
</dd
>
3395 <dt
>title
</dt
>
3396 <dd
>The title of the movie, without the publication year.
</dd
>
3398 <dt
>date
</dt
>
3399 <dd
>The data or year the movie was released. This make the movie show
3400 up in Butter, as well as make it possible to know the age of the
3401 movie and is useful to figure out copyright status.
</dd
>
3403 <dt
>director
</dt
>
3404 <dd
>The director of the movie. This make it easier to know if the
3405 correct movie is found in movie databases.
</dd
>
3407 <dt
>publisher
</dt
>
3408 <dd
>The production company making the movie. Also useful for
3409 identifying the correct movie.
</dd
>
3411 <dt
>links
</dt
>
3413 <dd
>Add a link to the IMDB title page, for example like this:
&lt;a
3414 href=
"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028496/
"&gt;Movie in
3415 IMDB
&lt;/a
&gt;. This make it easier to find duplicates and allow for
3416 counting of number of unique movies in the Archive. Other external
3417 references, like to TMDB, could be added like this too.
</dd
>
3421 <p
>I did consider proposing a Custom field for the IMDB title ID (for
3422 example
'imdb_title_url
',
'imdb_code
' or simply
'imdb
', but suspect it
3423 will be easier to simply place it in the links free text field.
</p
>
3426 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb
">a
3427 list of IMDB title IDs for several thousand movies in the Internet
3428 Archive
</a
>, but I also got a list of several thousand movies without
3429 such IMDB title ID (and quite a few duplicates). It would be great if
3430 this data set could be integrated into the Internet Archive metadata
3431 to be available for everyone in the future, but with the current
3432 policy of leaving metadata editing to the uploaders, it will take a
3433 while before this happen. If you have uploaded movies into the
3434 Internet Archive, you can help. Please consider following my proposal
3435 above for your movies, to ensure that movie is properly
3436 counted. :)
</p
>
3438 <p
>The list is mostly generated using wikidata, which based on
3439 Wikipedia articles make it possible to link between IMDB and movies in
3440 the Internet Archive. But there are lots of movies without a
3441 Wikipedia article, and some movies where only a collection page exist
3442 (like for
<a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caminandes
">the
3443 Caminandes example above
</a
>, where there are three movies but only
3444 one Wikidata entry).
</p
>
3446 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3447 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3448 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
3453 <title>Legal to share more than
3000 movies listed on IMDB?
</title>
3454 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Legal_to_share_more_than_3000_movies_listed_on_IMDB_.html
</link>
3455 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Legal_to_share_more_than_3000_movies_listed_on_IMDB_.html
</guid>
3456 <pubDate>Sat,
18 Nov
2017 21:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
3457 <description><p
>A month ago, I blogged about my work to
3458 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Locating_IMDB_IDs_of_movies_in_the_Internet_Archive_using_Wikidata.html
">automatically
3459 check the copyright status of IMDB entries
</a
>, and try to count the
3460 number of movies listed in IMDB that is legal to distribute on the
3461 Internet. I have continued to look for good data sources, and
3462 identified a few more. The code used to extract information from
3463 various data sources is available in
3464 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb
">a
3465 git repository
</a
>, currently available from github.
</p
>
3467 <p
>So far I have identified
3186 unique IMDB title IDs. To gain
3468 better understanding of the structure of the data set, I created a
3469 histogram of the year associated with each movie (typically release
3470 year). It is interesting to notice where the peaks and dips in the
3471 graph are located. I wonder why they are placed there. I suspect
3472 World War II caused the dip around
1940, but what caused the peak
3473 around
2010?
</p
>
3475 <p align=
"center
"><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2017-
11-
18-verk-i-det-fri-filmer.png
" /
></p
>
3477 <p
>I
've so far identified ten sources for IMDB title IDs for movies in
3478 the public domain or with a free license. This is the statistics
3479 reported when running
'make stats
' in the git repository:
</p
>
3482 249 entries (
6 unique) with and
288 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-butter.json
3483 2301 entries (
540 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json
3484 830 entries (
29 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-icheckmovies-archive-mochard.json
3485 2109 entries (
377 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-pd.json
3486 291 entries (
122 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-pd.json
3487 144 entries (
135 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-manual.json
3488 350 entries (
1 unique) with and
801 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies.json
3489 4 entries (
0 unique) with and
124 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainreview.json
3490 698 entries (
119 unique) with and
118 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomaintorrents.json
3491 8 entries (
8 unique) with and
196 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-vodo.json
3492 3186 unique IMDB title IDs in total
3495 <p
>The entries without IMDB title ID are candidates to increase the
3496 data set, but might equally well be duplicates of entries already
3497 listed with IMDB title ID in one of the other sources, or represent
3498 movies that lack a IMDB title ID. I
've seen examples of all these
3499 situations when peeking at the entries without IMDB title ID. Based
3500 on these data sources, the lower bound for movies listed in IMDB that
3501 are legal to distribute on the Internet is between
3186 and
4713.
3503 <p
>It would be great for improving the accuracy of this measurement,
3504 if the various sources added IMDB title ID to their metadata. I have
3505 tried to reach the people behind the various sources to ask if they
3506 are interested in doing this, without any replies so far. Perhaps you
3507 can help me get in touch with the people behind VODO, Public Domain
3508 Torrents, Public Domain Movies and Public Domain Review to try to
3509 convince them to add more metadata to their movie entries?
</p
>
3511 <p
>Another way you could help is by adding pages to Wikipedia about
3512 movies that are legal to distribute on the Internet. If such page
3513 exist and include a link to both IMDB and The Internet Archive, the
3514 script used to generate free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json should
3515 pick up the mapping as soon as wikidata is updates.
</p
>
3517 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3518 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3519 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
3524 <title>Some notes on fault tolerant storage systems
</title>
3525 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_fault_tolerant_storage_systems.html
</link>
3526 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_fault_tolerant_storage_systems.html
</guid>
3527 <pubDate>Wed,
1 Nov
2017 15:
35:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
3528 <description><p
>If you care about how fault tolerant your storage is, you might
3529 find these articles and papers interesting. They have formed how I
3530 think of when designing a storage system.
</p
>
3534 <li
>USENIX :login;
<a
3535 href=
"https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2017/ganesan
">Redundancy
3536 Does Not Imply Fault Tolerance. Analysis of Distributed Storage
3537 Reactions to Single Errors and Corruptions
</a
> by Aishwarya Ganesan,
3538 Ramnatthan Alagappan, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi
3539 H. Arpaci-Dusseau
</li
>
3542 <a href=
"http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-
5-stops-working-in-
2009/
">Why
3543 RAID
5 stops working in
2009</a
> by Robin Harris
</li
>
3546 <a href=
"http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-
6-stops-working-in-
2019/
">Why
3547 RAID
6 stops working in
2019</a
> by Robin Harris
</li
>
3549 <li
>USENIX FAST
'07
3550 <a href=
"http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf
">Failure
3551 Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population
</a
> by Eduardo Pinheiro,
3552 Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz André Barroso
</li
>
3554 <li
>USENIX ;login:
<a
3555 href=
"https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/hughes12-
04.pdf
">Data
3556 Integrity. Finding Truth in a World of Guesses and Lies
</a
> by Doug
3559 <li
>USENIX FAST
'08
3560 <a href=
"https://www.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/bairavasundaram/bairavasundaram_html/
">An
3561 Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack
</a
> by
3562 L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, B. Schroeder, A. C.
3563 Arpaci-Dusseau, and R. H. Arpaci-Dusseau
</li
>
3565 <li
>USENIX FAST
'07 <a
3566 href=
"https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/
">Disk
3567 failures in the real world: what does an MTTF of
1,
000,
000 hours mean
3568 to you?
</a
> by B. Schroeder and G. A. Gibson.
</li
>
3570 <li
>USENIX ;login:
<a
3571 href=
"https://www.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/jiang/jiang_html/
">Are
3572 Disks the Dominant Contributor for Storage Failures? A Comprehensive
3573 Study of Storage Subsystem Failure Characteristics
</a
> by Weihang
3574 Jiang, Chongfeng Hu, Yuanyuan Zhou, and Arkady Kanevsky
</li
>
3576 <li
>SIGMETRICS
2007
3577 <a href=
"http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/latent-sigmetrics07.pdf
">An
3578 analysis of latent sector errors in disk drives
</a
> by
3579 L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, S. Pasupathy, and J. Schindler
</li
>
3583 <p
>Several of these research papers are based on data collected from
3584 hundred thousands or millions of disk, and their findings are eye
3585 opening. The short story is simply do not implicitly trust RAID or
3586 redundant storage systems. Details matter. And unfortunately there
3587 are few options on Linux addressing all the identified issues. Both
3588 ZFS and Btrfs are doing a fairly good job, but have legal and
3589 practical issues on their own. I wonder how cluster file systems like
3590 Ceph do in this regard. After all, there is an old saying, you know
3591 you have a distributed system when the crash of a computer you have
3592 never heard of stops you from getting any work done. The same holds
3593 true if fault tolerance do not work.
</p
>
3595 <p
>Just remember, in the end, it do not matter how redundant, or how
3596 fault tolerant your storage is, if you do not continuously monitor its
3597 status to detect and replace failed disks.
</p
>
3599 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3600 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3601 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
3606 <title>Web services for writing academic LaTeX papers as a team
</title>
3607 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_services_for_writing_academic_LaTeX_papers_as_a_team.html
</link>
3608 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_services_for_writing_academic_LaTeX_papers_as_a_team.html
</guid>
3609 <pubDate>Tue,
31 Oct
2017 21:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
3610 <description><p
>I was surprised today to learn that a friend in academia did not
3611 know there are easily available web services available for writing
3612 LaTeX documents as a team. I thought it was common knowledge, but to
3613 make sure at least my readers are aware of it, I would like to mention
3614 these useful services for writing LaTeX documents. Some of them even
3615 provide a WYSIWYG editor to ease writing even further.
</p
>
3617 <p
>There are two commercial services available,
3618 <a href=
"https://sharelatex.com
">ShareLaTeX
</a
> and
3619 <a href=
"https://overleaf.com
">Overleaf
</a
>. They are very easy to
3620 use. Just start a new document, select which publisher to write for
3621 (ie which LaTeX style to use), and start writing. Note, these two
3622 have announced their intention to join forces, so soon it will only be
3623 one joint service. I
've used both for different documents, and they
3624 work just fine. While
3625 <a href=
"https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex
">ShareLaTeX is free
3626 software
</a
>, while the latter is not. According to
<a
3627 href=
"https://www.overleaf.com/help/
17-is-overleaf-open-source
">a
3628 announcement from Overleaf
</a
>, they plan to keep the ShareLaTeX code
3629 base maintained as free software.
</p
>
3631 But these two are not the only alternatives.
3632 <a href=
"https://app.fiduswriter.org/
">Fidus Writer
</a
> is another free
3633 software solution with
<a href=
"https://github.com/fiduswriter
">the
3634 source available on github
</a
>. I have not used it myself. Several
3635 others can be found on the nice
3636 <a href=
"https://alternativeto.net/software/sharelatex/
">alterntiveTo
3637 web service
</a
>.
3639 <p
>If you like Google Docs or Etherpad, but would like to write
3640 documents in LaTeX, you should check out these services. You can even
3641 host your own, if you want to. :)
</p
>
3643 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3644 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3645 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
3650 <title>Locating IMDB IDs of movies in the Internet Archive using Wikidata
</title>
3651 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Locating_IMDB_IDs_of_movies_in_the_Internet_Archive_using_Wikidata.html
</link>
3652 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Locating_IMDB_IDs_of_movies_in_the_Internet_Archive_using_Wikidata.html
</guid>
3653 <pubDate>Wed,
25 Oct
2017 12:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3654 <description><p
>Recently, I needed to automatically check the copyright status of a
3655 set of
<a href=
"http://www.imdb.com/
">The Internet Movie database
3656 (IMDB)
</a
> entries, to figure out which one of the movies they refer
3657 to can be freely distributed on the Internet. This proved to be
3658 harder than it sounds. IMDB for sure list movies without any
3659 copyright protection, where the copyright protection has expired or
3660 where the movie is lisenced using a permissive license like one from
3661 Creative Commons. These are mixed with copyright protected movies,
3662 and there seem to be no way to separate these classes of movies using
3663 the information in IMDB.
</p
>
3665 <p
>First I tried to look up entries manually in IMDB,
3666 <a href=
"https://www.wikipedia.org/
">Wikipedia
</a
> and
3667 <a href=
"https://www.archive.org/
">The Internet Archive
</a
>, to get a
3668 feel how to do this. It is hard to know for sure using these sources,
3669 but it should be possible to be reasonable confident a movie is
"out
3670 of copyright
" with a few hours work per movie. As I needed to check
3671 almost
20,
000 entries, this approach was not sustainable. I simply
3672 can not work around the clock for about
6 years to check this data
3675 <p
>I asked the people behind The Internet Archive if they could
3676 introduce a new metadata field in their metadata XML for IMDB ID, but
3677 was told that they leave it completely to the uploaders to update the
3678 metadata. Some of the metadata entries had IMDB links in the
3679 description, but I found no way to download all metadata files in bulk
3680 to locate those ones and put that approach aside.
</p
>
3682 <p
>In the process I noticed several Wikipedia articles about movies
3683 had links to both IMDB and The Internet Archive, and it occured to me
3684 that I could use the Wikipedia RDF data set to locate entries with
3685 both, to at least get a lower bound on the number of movies on The
3686 Internet Archive with a IMDB ID. This is useful based on the
3687 assumption that movies distributed by The Internet Archive can be
3688 legally distributed on the Internet. With some help from the RDF
3689 community (thank you DanC), I was able to come up with this query to
3690 pass to
<a href=
"https://query.wikidata.org/
">the SPARQL interface on
3693 <p
><pre
>
3694 SELECT ?work ?imdb ?ia ?when ?label
3697 ?work wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q11424.
3698 ?work wdt:P345 ?imdb.
3701 ?work wdt:P577 ?when.
3702 ?work rdfs:label ?label.
3703 FILTER(LANG(?label) =
"en
").
3706 </pre
></p
>
3708 <p
>If I understand the query right, for every film entry anywhere in
3709 Wikpedia, it will return the IMDB ID and The Internet Archive ID, and
3710 when the movie was released and its English title, if either or both
3711 of the latter two are available. At the moment the result set contain
3712 2338 entries. Of course, it depend on volunteers including both
3713 correct IMDB and The Internet Archive IDs in the wikipedia articles
3714 for the movie. It should be noted that the result will include
3715 duplicates if the movie have entries in several languages. There are
3716 some bogus entries, either because The Internet Archive ID contain a
3717 typo or because the movie is not available from The Internet Archive.
3718 I did not verify the IMDB IDs, as I am unsure how to do that
3719 automatically.
</p
>
3721 <p
>I wrote a small python script to extract the data set from Wikidata
3722 and check if the XML metadata for the movie is available from The
3723 Internet Archive, and after around
1.5 hour it produced a list of
2097
3724 free movies and their IMDB ID. In total,
171 entries in Wikidata lack
3725 the refered Internet Archive entry. I assume the
70 "disappearing
"
3726 entries (ie
2338-
2097-
171) are duplicate entries.
</p
>
3728 <p
>This is not too bad, given that The Internet Archive report to
3729 contain
<a href=
"https://archive.org/details/feature_films
">5331
3730 feature films
</a
> at the moment, but it also mean more than
3000
3731 movies are missing on Wikipedia or are missing the pair of references
3732 on Wikipedia.
</p
>
3734 <p
>I was curious about the distribution by release year, and made a
3735 little graph to show how the amount of free movies is spread over the
3738 <p
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2017-
10-
25-verk-i-det-fri-filmer.png
"></p
>
3740 <p
>I expect the relative distribution of the remaining
3000 movies to
3741 be similar.
</p
>
3743 <p
>If you want to help, and want to ensure Wikipedia can be used to
3744 cross reference The Internet Archive and The Internet Movie Database,
3745 please make sure entries like this are listed under the
"External
3746 links
" heading on the Wikipedia article for the movie:
</p
>
3748 <p
><pre
>
3749 * {{Internet Archive film|id=FightingLady}}
3750 * {{IMDb title|id=
0036823|title=The Fighting Lady}}
3751 </pre
></p
>
3753 <p
>Please verify the links on the final page, to make sure you did not
3754 introduce a typo.
</p
>
3756 <p
>Here is the complete list, if you want to correct the
171
3757 identified Wikipedia entries with broken links to The Internet
3758 Archive:
<a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1140317
">Q1140317
</a
>,
3759 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q458656
">Q458656
</a
>,
3760 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q458656
">Q458656
</a
>,
3761 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q470560
">Q470560
</a
>,
3762 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q743340
">Q743340
</a
>,
3763 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q822580
">Q822580
</a
>,
3764 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q480696
">Q480696
</a
>,
3765 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q128761
">Q128761
</a
>,
3766 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1307059
">Q1307059
</a
>,
3767 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1335091
">Q1335091
</a
>,
3768 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1537166
">Q1537166
</a
>,
3769 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1438334
">Q1438334
</a
>,
3770 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1479751
">Q1479751
</a
>,
3771 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1497200
">Q1497200
</a
>,
3772 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1498122
">Q1498122
</a
>,
3773 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q865973
">Q865973
</a
>,
3774 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q834269
">Q834269
</a
>,
3775 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q841781
">Q841781
</a
>,
3776 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q841781
">Q841781
</a
>,
3777 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1548193
">Q1548193
</a
>,
3778 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q499031
">Q499031
</a
>,
3779 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1564769
">Q1564769
</a
>,
3780 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1585239
">Q1585239
</a
>,
3781 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1585569
">Q1585569
</a
>,
3782 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1624236
">Q1624236
</a
>,
3783 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4796595
">Q4796595
</a
>,
3784 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4853469
">Q4853469
</a
>,
3785 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4873046
">Q4873046
</a
>,
3786 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q915016
">Q915016
</a
>,
3787 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4660396
">Q4660396
</a
>,
3788 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4677708
">Q4677708
</a
>,
3789 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4738449
">Q4738449
</a
>,
3790 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4756096
">Q4756096
</a
>,
3791 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4766785
">Q4766785
</a
>,
3792 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q880357
">Q880357
</a
>,
3793 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q882066
">Q882066
</a
>,
3794 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q882066
">Q882066
</a
>,
3795 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q204191
">Q204191
</a
>,
3796 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q204191
">Q204191
</a
>,
3797 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1194170
">Q1194170
</a
>,
3798 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q940014
">Q940014
</a
>,
3799 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q946863
">Q946863
</a
>,
3800 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q172837
">Q172837
</a
>,
3801 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q573077
">Q573077
</a
>,
3802 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1219005
">Q1219005
</a
>,
3803 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1219599
">Q1219599
</a
>,
3804 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1643798
">Q1643798
</a
>,
3805 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1656352
">Q1656352
</a
>,
3806 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1659549
">Q1659549
</a
>,
3807 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1660007
">Q1660007
</a
>,
3808 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1698154
">Q1698154
</a
>,
3809 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1737980
">Q1737980
</a
>,
3810 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1877284
">Q1877284
</a
>,
3811 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199354
">Q1199354
</a
>,
3812 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199354
">Q1199354
</a
>,
3813 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199451
">Q1199451
</a
>,
3814 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1211871
">Q1211871
</a
>,
3815 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1212179
">Q1212179
</a
>,
3816 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1238382
">Q1238382
</a
>,
3817 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4906454
">Q4906454
</a
>,
3818 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q320219
">Q320219
</a
>,
3819 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1148649
">Q1148649
</a
>,
3820 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q645094
">Q645094
</a
>,
3821 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5050350
">Q5050350
</a
>,
3822 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166548
">Q5166548
</a
>,
3823 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2677926
">Q2677926
</a
>,
3824 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2698139
">Q2698139
</a
>,
3825 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2707305
">Q2707305
</a
>,
3826 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2740725
">Q2740725
</a
>,
3827 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2024780
">Q2024780
</a
>,
3828 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2117418
">Q2117418
</a
>,
3829 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2138984
">Q2138984
</a
>,
3830 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1127992
">Q1127992
</a
>,
3831 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1058087
">Q1058087
</a
>,
3832 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1070484
">Q1070484
</a
>,
3833 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1080080
">Q1080080
</a
>,
3834 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1090813
">Q1090813
</a
>,
3835 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1251918
">Q1251918
</a
>,
3836 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1254110
">Q1254110
</a
>,
3837 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1257070
">Q1257070
</a
>,
3838 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1257079
">Q1257079
</a
>,
3839 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1197410
">Q1197410
</a
>,
3840 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1198423
">Q1198423
</a
>,
3841 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q706951
">Q706951
</a
>,
3842 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q723239
">Q723239
</a
>,
3843 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2079261
">Q2079261
</a
>,
3844 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1171364
">Q1171364
</a
>,
3845 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q617858
">Q617858
</a
>,
3846 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166611
">Q5166611
</a
>,
3847 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166611
">Q5166611
</a
>,
3848 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q324513
">Q324513
</a
>,
3849 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q374172
">Q374172
</a
>,
3850 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7533269
">Q7533269
</a
>,
3851 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q970386
">Q970386
</a
>,
3852 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q976849
">Q976849
</a
>,
3853 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7458614
">Q7458614
</a
>,
3854 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5347416
">Q5347416
</a
>,
3855 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5460005
">Q5460005
</a
>,
3856 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5463392
">Q5463392
</a
>,
3857 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3038555
">Q3038555
</a
>,
3858 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5288458
">Q5288458
</a
>,
3859 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2346516
">Q2346516
</a
>,
3860 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5183645
">Q5183645
</a
>,
3861 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5185497
">Q5185497
</a
>,
3862 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5216127
">Q5216127
</a
>,
3863 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5223127
">Q5223127
</a
>,
3864 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5261159
">Q5261159
</a
>,
3865 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1300759
">Q1300759
</a
>,
3866 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5521241
">Q5521241
</a
>,
3867 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7733434
">Q7733434
</a
>,
3868 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7736264
">Q7736264
</a
>,
3869 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7737032
">Q7737032
</a
>,
3870 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7882671
">Q7882671
</a
>,
3871 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7719427
">Q7719427
</a
>,
3872 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7719444
">Q7719444
</a
>,
3873 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7722575
">Q7722575
</a
>,
3874 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2629763
">Q2629763
</a
>,
3875 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2640346
">Q2640346
</a
>,
3876 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2649671
">Q2649671
</a
>,
3877 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7703851
">Q7703851
</a
>,
3878 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7747041
">Q7747041
</a
>,
3879 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6544949
">Q6544949
</a
>,
3880 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6672759
">Q6672759
</a
>,
3881 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2445896
">Q2445896
</a
>,
3882 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q12124891
">Q12124891
</a
>,
3883 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3127044
">Q3127044
</a
>,
3884 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2511262
">Q2511262
</a
>,
3885 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2517672
">Q2517672
</a
>,
3886 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2543165
">Q2543165
</a
>,
3887 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q426628
">Q426628
</a
>,
3888 <a href=
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3907 <a href=
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>,
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</a
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3920 <a href=
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3927 <a href=
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</a
>,
3928 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q774474
">Q774474
</a
></p
>
3930 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3931 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3932 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
3937 <title>A one-way wall on the border?
</title>
3938 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_one_way_wall_on_the_border_.html
</link>
3939 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_one_way_wall_on_the_border_.html
</guid>
3940 <pubDate>Sat,
14 Oct
2017 22:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3941 <description><p
>I find it fascinating how many of the people being locked inside
3942 the proposed border wall between USA and Mexico support the idea. The
3943 proposal to keep Mexicans out reminds me of
3944 <a href=
"http://www.history.com/news/
10-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-berlin-wall
">the
3945 propaganda twist from the East Germany government
</a
> calling the wall
3946 the “Antifascist Bulwark” after erecting the Berlin Wall, claiming
3947 that the wall was erected to keep enemies from creeping into East
3948 Germany, while it was obvious to the people locked inside it that it
3949 was erected to keep the people from escaping.
</p
>
3951 <p
>Do the people in USA supporting this wall really believe it is a
3952 one way wall, only keeping people on the outside from getting in,
3953 while not keeping people in the inside from getting out?
</p
>
3955 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3956 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3957 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
3962 <title>Generating
3D prints in Debian using Cura and Slic3r(-prusa)
</title>
3963 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Generating_3D_prints_in_Debian_using_Cura_and_Slic3r__prusa_.html
</link>
3964 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Generating_3D_prints_in_Debian_using_Cura_and_Slic3r__prusa_.html
</guid>
3965 <pubDate>Mon,
9 Oct
2017 10:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3966 <description><p
>At my nearby maker space,
3967 <a href=
"http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/
">Sonen
</a
>, I heard the story that it
3968 was easier to generate gcode files for theyr
3D printers (Ultimake
2+)
3969 on Windows and MacOS X than Linux, because the software involved had
3970 to be manually compiled and set up on Linux while premade packages
3971 worked out of the box on Windows and MacOS X. I found this annoying,
3972 as the software involved,
3973 <a href=
"https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura
">Cura
</a
>, is free software
3974 and should be trivial to get up and running on Linux if someone took
3975 the time to package it for the relevant distributions. I even found
3976 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
706656">a request for adding into
3977 Debian
</a
> from
2013, which had seem some activity over the years but
3978 never resulted in the software showing up in Debian. So a few days
3979 ago I offered my help to try to improve the situation.
</p
>
3981 <p
>Now I am very happy to see that all the packages required by a
3982 working Cura in Debian are uploaded into Debian and waiting in the NEW
3983 queue for the ftpmasters to have a look. You can track the progress
3985 <a href=
"https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=
3dprinter-general%
40lists.alioth.debian.org
">the
3986 status page for the
3D printer team
</a
>.
</p
>
3988 <p
>The uploaded packages are a bit behind upstream, and was uploaded
3989 now to get slots in
<a href=
"https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html
">the NEW
3990 queue
</a
> while we work up updating the packages to the latest
3991 upstream version.
</p
>
3993 <p
>On a related note, two competitors for Cura, which I found harder
3994 to use and was unable to configure correctly for Ultimaker
2+ in the
3995 short time I spent on it, are already in Debian. If you are looking
3996 for
3D printer
"slicers
" and want something already available in
3998 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r
">slic3r
</a
> and
3999 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r-prusa
">slic3r-prusa
</a
>.
4000 The latter is a fork of the former.
</p
>
4002 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4003 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4004 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
4009 <title>Visualizing GSM radio chatter using gr-gsm and Hopglass
</title>
4010 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Visualizing_GSM_radio_chatter_using_gr_gsm_and_Hopglass.html
</link>
4011 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Visualizing_GSM_radio_chatter_using_gr_gsm_and_Hopglass.html
</guid>
4012 <pubDate>Fri,
29 Sep
2017 10:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
4013 <description><p
>Every mobile phone announce its existence over radio to the nearby
4014 mobile cell towers. And this radio chatter is available for anyone
4015 with a radio receiver capable of receiving them. Details about the
4016 mobile phones with very good accuracy is of course collected by the
4017 phone companies, but this is not the topic of this blog post. The
4018 mobile phone radio chatter make it possible to figure out when a cell
4019 phone is nearby, as it include the SIM card ID (IMSI). By paying
4020 attention over time, one can see when a phone arrive and when it leave
4021 an area. I believe it would be nice to make this information more
4022 available to the general public, to make more people aware of how
4023 their phones are announcing their whereabouts to anyone that care to
4026 <p
>I am very happy to report that we managed to get something
4027 visualizing this information up and running for
4028 <a href=
"http://norwaymakers.org/osf17
">Oslo Skaperfestival
2017</a
>
4029 (Oslo Makers Festival) taking place today and tomorrow at Deichmanske
4030 library. The solution is based on the
4031 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html
">simple
4032 recipe for listening to GSM chatter
</a
> I posted a few days ago, and
4033 will show up at the stand of
<a href=
"http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/
">Åpen
4034 Sone from the Computer Science department of the University of
4035 Oslo
</a
>. The presentation will show the nearby mobile phones (aka
4036 IMSIs) as dots in a web browser graph, with lines to the dot
4037 representing mobile base station it is talking to. It was working in
4038 the lab yesterday, and was moved into place this morning.
</p
>
4040 <p
>We set up a fairly powerful desktop machine using Debian
4041 Buster/Testing with several (five, I believe) RTL2838 DVB-T receivers
4042 connected and visualize the visible cell phone towers using an
4043 <a href=
"https://github.com/marlow925/hopglass
">English version of
4044 Hopglass
</a
>. A fairly powerfull machine is needed as the
4045 grgsm_livemon_headless processes from
4046 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm
">gr-gsm
</a
> converting
4047 the radio signal to data packages is quite CPU intensive.
</p
>
4049 <p
>The frequencies to listen to, are identified using a slightly
4050 patched scan-and-livemon (to set the --args values for each receiver),
4051 and the Hopglass data is generated using the
4052 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/IMSI-catcher/tree/meshviewer-output
">patches
4053 in my meshviewer-output branch
</a
>. For some reason we could not get
4054 more than four SDRs working. There is also a geographical map trying
4055 to show the location of the base stations, but I believe their
4056 coordinates are hardcoded to some random location in Germany, I
4057 believe. The code should be replaced with code to look up location in
4058 a text file, a sqlite database or one of the online databases
4060 <a href=
"https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher/issues/
14">the github
4061 issue for the topic
</a
>.
4063 <p
>If this sound interesting, visit the stand at the festival!
</p
>
4068 <title>Easier recipe to observe the cell phones around you
</title>
4069 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html
</link>
4070 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html
</guid>
4071 <pubDate>Sun,
24 Sep
2017 08:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
4072 <description><p
>A little more than a month ago I wrote
4073 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html
">how
4074 to observe the SIM card ID (aka IMSI number) of mobile phones talking
4075 to nearby mobile phone base stations using Debian GNU/Linux and a
4076 cheap USB software defined radio
</a
>, and thus being able to pinpoint
4077 the location of people and equipment (like cars and trains) with an
4078 accuracy of a few kilometer. Since then we have worked to make the
4079 procedure even simpler, and it is now possible to do this without any
4080 manual frequency tuning and without building your own packages.
</p
>
4082 <p
>The
<a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm
">gr-gsm
</a
>
4083 package is now included in Debian testing and unstable, and the
4084 IMSI-catcher code no longer require root access to fetch and decode
4085 the GSM data collected using gr-gsm.
</p
>
4087 <p
>Here is an updated recipe, using packages built by Debian and a git
4088 clone of two python scripts:
</p
>
4092 <li
>Start with a Debian machine running the Buster version (aka
4093 testing).
</li
>
4095 <li
>Run
'<tt
>apt install gr-gsm python-numpy python-scipy
4096 python-scapy
</tt
>' as root to install required packages.
</li
>
4098 <li
>Fetch the code decoding GSM packages using
'<tt
>git clone
4099 github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher.git
</tt
>'.
</li
>
4101 <li
>Insert USB software defined radio supported by GNU Radio.
</li
>
4103 <li
>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run
'<tt
>python
4104 scan-and-livemon
</tt
>' to locate the frequency of nearby base
4105 stations and start listening for GSM packages on one of them.
</li
>
4107 <li
>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run
'<tt
>python
4108 simple_IMSI-catcher.py
</tt
>' to display the collected information.
</li
>
4112 <p
>Note, due to a bug somewhere the scan-and-livemon program (actually
4113 <a href=
"https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/issues/
336">its underlying
4114 program grgsm_scanner
</a
>) do not work with the HackRF radio. It does
4115 work with RTL
8232 and other similar USB radio receivers you can get
4117 (
<a href=
"https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=rtl+
2832">for example
4118 from ebay
</a
>), so for now the solution is to scan using the RTL radio
4119 and only use HackRF for fetching GSM data.
</p
>
4121 <p
>As far as I can tell, a cell phone only show up on one of the
4122 frequencies at the time, so if you are going to track and count every
4123 cell phone around you, you need to listen to all the frequencies used.
4124 To listen to several frequencies, use the --numrecv argument to
4125 scan-and-livemon to use several receivers. Further, I am not sure if
4126 phones using
3G or
4G will show as talking GSM to base stations, so
4127 this approach might not see all phones around you. I typically see
4128 0-
400 IMSI numbers an hour when looking around where I live.
</p
>
4130 <p
>I
've tried to run the scanner on a
4131 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi
">Raspberry Pi
2 and
3
4132 running Debian Buster
</a
>, but the grgsm_livemon_headless process seem
4133 to be too CPU intensive to keep up. When GNU Radio print
'O
' to
4134 stdout, I am told there it is caused by a buffer overflow between the
4135 radio and GNU Radio, caused by the program being unable to read the
4136 GSM data fast enough. If you see a stream of
'O
's from the terminal
4137 where you started scan-and-livemon, you need a give the process more
4138 CPU power. Perhaps someone are able to optimize the code to a point
4139 where it become possible to set up RPi3 based GSM sniffers? I tried
4140 using Raspbian instead of Debian, but there seem to be something wrong
4141 with GNU Radio on raspbian, causing glibc to abort().
</p
>
4146 <title>Simpler recipe on how to make a simple $
7 IMSI Catcher using Debian
</title>
4147 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html
</link>
4148 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html
</guid>
4149 <pubDate>Wed,
9 Aug
2017 23:
59:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
4150 <description><p
>On friday, I came across an interesting article in the Norwegian
4151 web based ICT news magazine digi.no on
4152 <a href=
"https://www.digi.no/artikler/sikkerhetsforsker-lagde-enkel-imsi-catcher-for-
60-kroner-na-kan-mobiler-kartlegges-av-alle/
398588">how
4153 to collect the IMSI numbers of nearby cell phones
</a
> using the cheap
4154 DVB-T software defined radios. The article refered to instructions
4155 and
<a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjwgNd_as30
">a recipe by
4156 Keld Norman on Youtube on how to make a simple $
7 IMSI Catcher
</a
>, and I decided to test them out.
</p
>
4158 <p
>The instructions said to use Ubuntu, install pip using apt (to
4159 bypass apt), use pip to install pybombs (to bypass both apt and pip),
4160 and the ask pybombs to fetch and build everything you need from
4161 scratch. I wanted to see if I could do the same on the most recent
4162 Debian packages, but this did not work because pybombs tried to build
4163 stuff that no longer build with the most recent openssl library or
4164 some other version skew problem. While trying to get this recipe
4165 working, I learned that the apt-
>pip-
>pybombs route was a long detour,
4166 and the only piece of software dependency missing in Debian was the
4167 gr-gsm package. I also found out that the lead upstream developer of
4168 gr-gsm (the name stand for GNU Radio GSM) project already had a set of
4169 Debian packages provided in an Ubuntu PPA repository. All I needed to
4170 do was to dget the Debian source package and built it.
</p
>
4172 <p
>The IMSI collector is a python script listening for packages on the
4173 loopback network device and printing to the terminal some specific GSM
4174 packages with IMSI numbers in them. The code is fairly short and easy
4175 to understand. The reason this work is because gr-gsm include a tool
4176 to read GSM data from a software defined radio like a DVB-T USB stick
4177 and other software defined radios, decode them and inject them into a
4178 network device on your Linux machine (using the loopback device by
4179 default). This proved to work just fine, and I
've been testing the
4180 collector for a few days now.
</p
>
4182 <p
>The updated and simpler recipe is thus to
</p
>
4186 <li
>start with a Debian machine running Stretch or newer,
</li
>
4188 <li
>build and install the gr-gsm package available from
4189 <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
>
4191 <li
>clone the git repostory from
<a href=
"https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher
">https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher
</a
>,
</li
>
4193 <li
>run grgsm_livemon and adjust the frequency until the terminal
4194 where it was started is filled with a stream of text (meaning you
4195 found a GSM station).
</li
>
4197 <li
>go into the IMSI-catcher directory and run
'sudo python simple_IMSI-catcher.py
' to extract the IMSI numbers.
</li
>
4201 <p
>To make it even easier in the future to get this sniffer up and
4202 running, I decided to package
4203 <a href=
"https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/
">the gr-gsm project
</a
>
4204 for Debian (
<a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
871055">WNPP
4205 #
871055</a
>), and the package was uploaded into the NEW queue today.
4206 Luckily the gnuradio maintainer has promised to help me, as I do not
4207 know much about gnuradio stuff yet.
</p
>
4209 <p
>I doubt this
"IMSI cacher
" is anywhere near as powerfull as
4210 commercial tools like
4211 <a href=
"https://www.thespyphone.com/portable-imsi-imei-catcher/
">The
4212 Spy Phone Portable IMSI / IMEI Catcher
</a
> or the
4213 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker
">Harris
4214 Stingray
</a
>, but I hope the existance of cheap alternatives can make
4215 more people realise how their whereabouts when carrying a cell phone
4216 is easily tracked. Seeing the data flow on the screen, realizing that
4217 I live close to a police station and knowing that the police is also
4218 wearing cell phones, I wonder how hard it would be for criminals to
4219 track the position of the police officers to discover when there are
4220 police near by, or for foreign military forces to track the location
4221 of the Norwegian military forces, or for anyone to track the location
4222 of government officials...
</p
>
4224 <p
>It is worth noting that the data reported by the IMSI-catcher
4225 script mentioned above is only a fraction of the data broadcasted on
4226 the GSM network. It will only collect one frequency at the time,
4227 while a typical phone will be using several frequencies, and not all
4228 phones will be using the frequencies tracked by the grgsm_livemod
4229 program. Also, there is a lot of radio chatter being ignored by the
4230 simple_IMSI-catcher script, which would be collected by extending the
4231 parser code. I wonder if gr-gsm can be set up to listen to more than
4232 one frequency?
</p
>
4237 <title>Norwegian Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator
's Handbook is now available
</title>
4238 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_is_now_available.html
</link>
4239 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_is_now_available.html
</guid>
4240 <pubDate>Tue,
25 Jul
2017 21:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
4241 <description><p align=
"center
"><img align=
"center
" src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2017-
07-
25-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.png
"/
></p
>
4243 <p
>I finally received a copy of the Norwegian Bokmål edition of
4244 "<a href=
"https://debian-handbook.info/
">The Debian Administrator
's
4245 Handbook
</a
>". This test copy arrived in the mail a few days ago, and
4246 I am very happy to hold the result in my hand. We spent around one and a half year translating it. This paperbook edition
4247 <a href=
"https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian
">is available
4248 from lulu.com
</a
>. If you buy it quickly, you save
25% on the list
4249 price. The book is also available for download in electronic form as
4250 PDF, EPUB and Mobipocket, as can be
4251 <a href=
"https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/
">read online
4252 as a web page
</a
>.
</p
>
4254 <p
>This is the second book I publish (the first was the book
4255 "<a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
>" by Lawrence Lessig
4257 <a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-
22440520.html
">English
</a
>,
4258 <a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-
22645082.html
">French
</a
>
4260 <a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-
22441576.html
">Norwegian
4261 Bokmål
</a
>), and I am very excited to finally wrap up this
4263 "<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
4264 for Debian-administratoren
</a
>" will be well received.
</p
>
4269 <title>Updated sales number for my Free Culture paper editions
</title>
4270 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_sales_number_for_my_Free_Culture_paper_editions.html
</link>
4271 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_sales_number_for_my_Free_Culture_paper_editions.html
</guid>
4272 <pubDate>Mon,
12 Jun
2017 11:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
4273 <description><p
>It is pleasing to see that the work we put down in publishing new
4274 editions of the classic
<a href=
"http://www.free-culture.cc/
">Free
4275 Culture book
</a
> by the founder of the Creative Commons movement,
4276 Lawrence Lessig, is still being appreciated. I had a look at the
4277 latest sales numbers for the paper edition today. Not too impressive,
4278 but happy to see some buyers still exist. All the revenue from the
4279 books is sent to the
<a href=
"https://creativecommons.org/
">Creative
4280 Commons Corporation
</a
>, and they receive the largest cut if you buy
4281 directly from Lulu. Most books are sold via Amazon, with Ingram
4282 second and only a small fraction directly from Lulu. The ebook
4283 edition is available for free from
4284 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">Github
</a
>.
</p
>
4286 <table border=
"0">
4287 <tr
><th rowspan=
"2" valign=
"bottom
">Title / language
</th
><th colspan=
"3">Quantity
</th
></tr
>
4288 <tr
><th
>2016 jan-jun
</th
><th
>2016 jul-dec
</th
><th
>2017 jan-may
</th
></tr
>
4291 <td
><a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-
22645082.html
">Culture Libre / French
</a
></td
>
4292 <td align=
"right
">3</td
>
4293 <td align=
"right
">6</td
>
4294 <td align=
"right
">15</td
>
4298 <td
><a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-
22441576.html
">Fri kultur / Norwegian
</a
></td
>
4299 <td align=
"right
">7</td
>
4300 <td align=
"right
">1</td
>
4301 <td align=
"right
">0</td
>
4305 <td
><a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-
22440520.html
">Free Culture / English
</a
></td
>
4306 <td align=
"right
">14</td
>
4307 <td align=
"right
">27</td
>
4308 <td align=
"right
">16</td
>
4312 <td
>Total
</td
>
4313 <td align=
"right
">24</td
>
4314 <td align=
"right
">34</td
>
4315 <td align=
"right
">31</td
>
4320 <p
>A bit sad to see the low sales number on the Norwegian edition, and
4321 a bit surprising the English edition still selling so well.
</p
>
4323 <p
>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
4324 language, I would be happy to help make it happen. Please get in
4330 <title>Release
0.1.1 of free software archive system Nikita announced
</title>
4331 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Release_0_1_1_of_free_software_archive_system_Nikita_announced.html
</link>
4332 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Release_0_1_1_of_free_software_archive_system_Nikita_announced.html
</guid>
4333 <pubDate>Sat,
10 Jun
2017 00:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
4334 <description><p
>I am very happy to report that the
4335 <a href=
"https://github.com/hiOA-ABI/nikita-noark5-core
">Nikita Noark
5
4336 core project
</a
> tagged its second release today. The free software
4337 solution is an implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark
4338 5 used by government offices in Norway. These were the changes in
4339 version
0.1.1 since version
0.1.0 (from NEWS.md):
4343 <li
>Continued work on the angularjs GUI, including document upload.
</li
>
4344 <li
>Implemented correspondencepartPerson, correspondencepartUnit and
4345 correspondencepartInternal
</li
>
4346 <li
>Applied for coverity coverage and started submitting code on
4347 regualr basis.
</li
>
4348 <li
>Started fixing bugs reported by coverity
</li
>
4349 <li
>Corrected and completed HATEOAS links to make sure entire API is
4350 available via URLs in _links.
</li
>
4351 <li
>Corrected all relation URLs to use trailing slash.
</li
>
4352 <li
>Add initial support for storing data in ElasticSearch.
</li
>
4353 <li
>Now able to receive and store uploaded files in the archive.
</li
>
4354 <li
>Changed JSON output for object lists to have relations in _links.
</li
>
4355 <li
>Improve JSON output for empty object lists.
</li
>
4356 <li
>Now uses correct MIME type application/vnd.noark5-v4+json.
</li
>
4357 <li
>Added support for docker container images.
</li
>
4358 <li
>Added simple API browser implemented in JavaScript/Angular.
</li
>
4359 <li
>Started on archive client implemented in JavaScript/Angular.
</li
>
4360 <li
>Started on prototype to show the public mail journal.
</li
>
4361 <li
>Improved performance by disabling Sprint FileWatcher.
</li
>
4362 <li
>Added support for
'arkivskaper
',
'saksmappe
' and
'journalpost
'.
</li
>
4363 <li
>Added support for some metadata codelists.
</li
>
4364 <li
>Added support for Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS).
</li
>
4365 <li
>Changed login method from Basic Auth to JSON Web Token (RFC
7519)
4367 <li
>Added support for GET-ing ny-* URLs.
</li
>
4368 <li
>Added support for modifying entities using PUT and eTag.
</li
>
4369 <li
>Added support for returning XML output on request.
</li
>
4370 <li
>Removed support for English field and class names, limiting ourself
4371 to the official names.
</li
>
4372 <li
>...
</li
>
4376 <p
>If this sound interesting to you, please contact us on IRC (#nikita
4377 on irc.freenode.net) or email
4378 (
<a href=
"https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark
">nikita-noark
4379 mailing list).
</p
>
4384 <title>Idea for storing trusted timestamps in a Noark
5 archive
</title>
4385 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_trusted_timestamps_in_a_Noark_5_archive.html
</link>
4386 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_trusted_timestamps_in_a_Noark_5_archive.html
</guid>
4387 <pubDate>Wed,
7 Jun
2017 21:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
4388 <description><p
><em
>This is a copy of
4389 <a href=
"https://lists.nuug.no/pipermail/nikita-noark/
2017-June/
000297.html
">an
4390 email I posted to the nikita-noark mailing list
</a
>. Please follow up
4391 there if you would like to discuss this topic. The background is that
4392 we are making a free software archive system based on the Norwegian
4393 <a href=
"https://www.arkivverket.no/forvaltning-og-utvikling/regelverk-og-standarder/noark-standarden
">Noark
4394 5 standard
</a
> for government archives.
</em
></p
>
4396 <p
>I
've been wondering a bit lately how trusted timestamps could be
4398 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping
">Trusted
4399 timestamps
</a
> can be used to verify that some information
4400 (document/file/checksum/metadata) have not been changed since a
4401 specific time in the past. This is useful to verify the integrity of
4402 the documents in the archive.
</p
>
4404 <p
>Then it occured to me, perhaps the trusted timestamps could be
4405 stored as dokument variants (ie dokumentobjekt referered to from
4406 dokumentbeskrivelse) with the filename set to the hash it is
4409 <p
>Given a
"dokumentbeskrivelse
" with an associated
"dokumentobjekt
",
4410 a new dokumentobjekt is associated with
"dokumentbeskrivelse
" with the
4411 same attributes as the stamped dokumentobjekt except these
4412 attributes:
</p
>
4416 <li
>format -
> "RFC3161
"
4417 <li
>mimeType -
> "application/timestamp-reply
"
4418 <li
>formatDetaljer -
> "&lt;source URL for timestamp service
&gt;
"
4419 <li
>filenavn -
> "&lt;sjekksum
&gt;.tsr
"
4423 <p
>This assume a service following
4424 <a href=
"https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161
">IETF RFC
3161</a
> is
4425 used, which specifiy the given MIME type for replies and the .tsr file
4426 ending for the content of such trusted timestamp. As far as I can
4427 tell from the Noark
5 specifications, it is OK to have several
4428 variants/renderings of a dokument attached to a given
4429 dokumentbeskrivelse objekt. It might be stretching it a bit to make
4430 some of these variants represent crypto-signatures useful for
4431 verifying the document integrity instead of representing the dokument
4434 <p
>Using the source of the service in formatDetaljer allow several
4435 timestamping services to be used. This is useful to spread the risk
4436 of key compromise over several organisations. It would only be a
4437 problem to trust the timestamps if all of the organisations are
4438 compromised.
</p
>
4440 <p
>The following oneliner on Linux can be used to generate the tsr
4441 file. $input is the path to the file to checksum, and $sha256 is the
4442 SHA-
256 checksum of the file (ie the
"<sjekksum
>.tsr
" value mentioned
4445 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
4446 openssl ts -query -data
"$inputfile
" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
4447 | curl -s -H
"Content-Type: application/timestamp-query
" \
4448 --data-binary
"@-
" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de
> $sha256.tsr
4449 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
4451 <p
>To verify the timestamp, you first need to download the public key
4452 of the trusted timestamp service, for example using this command:
</p
>
4454 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
4455 wget -O ca-cert.txt \
4456 https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
4457 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
4459 <p
>Note, the public key should be stored alongside the timestamps in
4460 the archive to make sure it is also available
100 years from now. It
4461 is probably a good idea to standardise how and were to store such
4462 public keys, to make it easier to find for those trying to verify
4463 documents
100 or
1000 years from now. :)
</p
>
4465 <p
>The verification itself is a simple openssl command:
</p
>
4467 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
4468 openssl ts -verify -data $inputfile -in $sha256.tsr \
4469 -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
4470 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
4472 <p
>Is there any reason this approach would not work? Is it somehow against
4473 the Noark
5 specification?
</p
>
4478 <title>Free software archive system Nikita now able to store documents
</title>
4479 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_archive_system_Nikita_now_able_to_store_documents.html
</link>
4480 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_archive_system_Nikita_now_able_to_store_documents.html
</guid>
4481 <pubDate>Sun,
19 Mar
2017 08:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4482 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"https://github.com/hiOA-ABI/nikita-noark5-core
">Nikita
4483 Noark
5 core project
</a
> is implementing the Norwegian standard for
4484 keeping an electronic archive of government documents.
4485 <a href=
"http://www.arkivverket.no/arkivverket/Offentlig-forvaltning/Noark/Noark-
5/English-version
">The
4486 Noark
5 standard
</a
> document the requirement for data systems used by
4487 the archives in the Norwegian government, and the Noark
5 web interface
4488 specification document a REST web service for storing, searching and
4489 retrieving documents and metadata in such archive. I
've been involved
4490 in the project since a few weeks before Christmas, when the Norwegian
4492 <a href=
"https://www.nuug.no/news/NOARK5_kjerne_som_fri_programvare_f_r_epostliste_hos_NUUG.shtml
">announced
4493 it supported the project
</a
>. I believe this is an important project,
4494 and hope it can make it possible for the government archives in the
4495 future to use free software to keep the archives we citizens depend
4496 on. But as I do not hold such archive myself, personally my first use
4497 case is to store and analyse public mail journal metadata published
4498 from the government. I find it useful to have a clear use case in
4499 mind when developing, to make sure the system scratches one of my
4502 <p
>If you would like to help make sure there is a free software
4503 alternatives for the archives, please join our IRC channel
4504 (
<a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/%
23nikita
">#nikita on
4505 irc.freenode.net
</a
>) and
4506 <a href=
"https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark
">the
4507 project mailing list
</a
>.
</p
>
4509 <p
>When I got involved, the web service could store metadata about
4510 documents. But a few weeks ago, a new milestone was reached when it
4511 became possible to store full text documents too. Yesterday, I
4512 completed an implementation of a command line tool
4513 <tt
>archive-pdf
</tt
> to upload a PDF file to the archive using this
4514 API. The tool is very simple at the moment, and find existing
4515 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonds
">fonds
</a
>, series and
4516 files while asking the user to select which one to use if more than
4517 one exist. Once a file is identified, the PDF is associated with the
4518 file and uploaded, using the title extracted from the PDF itself. The
4519 process is fairly similar to visiting the archive, opening a cabinet,
4520 locating a file and storing a piece of paper in the archive. Here is
4521 a test run directly after populating the database with test data using
4522 our API tester:
</p
>
4524 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
4525 ~/src//noark5-tester$ ./archive-pdf mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
4526 using arkiv: Title of the test fonds created
2017-
03-
18T23:
49:
32.103446
4527 using arkivdel: Title of the test series created
2017-
03-
18T23:
49:
32.103446
4529 0 - Title of the test case file created
2017-
03-
18T23:
49:
32.103446
4530 1 - Title of the test file created
2017-
03-
18T23:
49:
32.103446
4531 Select which mappe you want (or search term):
0
4532 Uploading mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
4533 PDF title: Mangler i spesifikasjonsdokumentet for NOARK
5 Tjenestegrensesnitt
4534 File
2017/
1: Title of the test case file created
2017-
03-
18T23:
49:
32.103446
4535 ~/src//noark5-tester$
4536 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
4538 <p
>You can see here how the fonds (arkiv) and serie (arkivdel) only had
4539 one option, while the user need to choose which file (mappe) to use
4540 among the two created by the API tester. The
<tt
>archive-pdf
</tt
>
4541 tool can be found in the git repository for the API tester.
</p
>
4543 <p
>In the project, I have been mostly working on
4544 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester
">the API
4545 tester
</a
> so far, while getting to know the code base. The API
4546 tester currently use
4547 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS
">the HATEOAS links
</a
>
4548 to traverse the entire exposed service API and verify that the exposed
4549 operations and objects match the specification, as well as trying to
4550 create objects holding metadata and uploading a simple XML file to
4551 store. The tester has proved very useful for finding flaws in our
4552 implementation, as well as flaws in the reference site and the
4553 specification.
</p
>
4555 <p
>The test document I uploaded is a summary of all the specification
4556 defects we have collected so far while implementing the web service.
4557 There are several unclear and conflicting parts of the specification,
4559 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester/tree/master/mangelmelding
">started
4560 writing down
</a
> the questions we get from implementing it. We use a
4561 format inspired by how
<a href=
"http://www.opengroup.org/austin/
">The
4562 Austin Group
</a
> collect defect reports for the POSIX standard with
4563 <a href=
"http://www.opengroup.org/austin/mantis.html
">their
4564 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
> :).
4566 <p
>The Nikita project is implemented using Java and Spring, and is
4567 fairly easy to get up and running using Docker containers for those
4568 that want to test the current code base. The API tester is
4569 implemented in Python.
</p
>
4574 <title>Detecting NFS hangs on Linux without hanging yourself...
</title>
4575 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detecting_NFS_hangs_on_Linux_without_hanging_yourself___.html
</link>
4576 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detecting_NFS_hangs_on_Linux_without_hanging_yourself___.html
</guid>
4577 <pubDate>Thu,
9 Mar
2017 15:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4578 <description><p
>Over the years, administrating thousand of NFS mounting linux
4579 computers at the time, I often needed a way to detect if the machine
4580 was experiencing NFS hang. If you try to use
<tt
>df
</tt
> or look at a
4581 file or directory affected by the hang, the process (and possibly the
4582 shell) will hang too. So you want to be able to detect this without
4583 risking the detection process getting stuck too. It has not been
4584 obvious how to do this. When the hang has lasted a while, it is
4585 possible to find messages like these in dmesg:
</p
>
4587 <p
><blockquote
>
4588 nfs: server nfsserver not responding, still trying
4589 <br
>nfs: server nfsserver OK
4590 </blockquote
></p
>
4592 <p
>It is hard to know if the hang is still going on, and it is hard to
4593 be sure looking in dmesg is going to work. If there are lots of other
4594 messages in dmesg the lines might have rotated out of site before they
4595 are noticed.
</p
>
4597 <p
>While reading through the nfs client implementation in linux kernel
4598 code, I came across some statistics that seem to give a way to detect
4599 it. The om_timeouts sunrpc value in the kernel will increase every
4600 time the above log entry is inserted into dmesg. And after digging a
4601 bit further, I discovered that this value show up in
4602 /proc/self/mountstats on Linux.
</p
>
4604 <p
>The mountstats content seem to be shared between files using the
4605 same file system context, so it is enough to check one of the
4606 mountstats files to get the state of the mount point for the machine.
4607 I assume this will not show lazy umounted NFS points, nor NFS mount
4608 points in a different process context (ie with a different filesystem
4609 view), but that does not worry me.
</p
>
4611 <p
>The content for a NFS mount point look similar to this:
</p
>
4613 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
4615 device /dev/mapper/Debian-var mounted on /var with fstype ext3
4616 device nfsserver:/mnt/nfsserver/home0 mounted on /mnt/nfsserver/home0 with fstype nfs statvers=
1.1
4617 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
4619 caps: caps=
0x3fe7,wtmult=
4096,dtsize=
8192,bsize=
0,namlen=
255
4620 sec: flavor=
1,pseudoflavor=
1
4621 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
4622 bytes:
166253035039 219519120027 0 0 40783504807 185466229638 11677877 45561809
4623 RPC iostats version:
1.0 p/v:
100003/
3 (nfs)
4624 xprt: tcp
925 1 6810 0 0 111505412 111480497 109 2672418560317 0 248 53869103 22481820
4626 NULL:
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
4627 GETATTR:
61063106 61063108 0 9621383060 6839064400 453650 77291321 78926132
4628 SETATTR:
463469 463470 0 92005440 66739536 63787 603235 687943
4629 LOOKUP:
17021657 17021657 0 3354097764 4013442928 57216 35125459 35566511
4630 ACCESS:
14281703 14290009 5 2318400592 1713803640 1709282 4865144 7130140
4631 READLINK:
125 125 0 20472 18620 0 1112 1118
4632 READ:
4214236 4214237 0 715608524 41328653212 89884 22622768 22806693
4633 WRITE:
8479010 8494376 22 187695798568 1356087148 178264904 51506907 231671771
4634 CREATE:
171708 171708 0 38084748 46702272 873 1041833 1050398
4635 MKDIR:
3680 3680 0 773980 993920 26 23990 24245
4636 SYMLINK:
903 903 0 233428 245488 6 5865 5917
4637 MKNOD:
80 80 0 20148 21760 0 299 304
4638 REMOVE:
429921 429921 0 79796004 61908192 3313 2710416 2741636
4639 RMDIR:
3367 3367 0 645112 484848 22 5782 6002
4640 RENAME:
466201 466201 0 130026184 121212260 7075 5935207 5961288
4641 LINK:
289155 289155 0 72775556 67083960 2199 2565060 2585579
4642 READDIR:
2933237 2933237 0 516506204 13973833412 10385 3190199 3297917
4643 READDIRPLUS:
1652839 1652839 0 298640972 6895997744 84735 14307895 14448937
4644 FSSTAT:
6144 6144 0 1010516 1032192 51 9654 10022
4645 FSINFO:
2 2 0 232 328 0 1 1
4646 PATHCONF:
1 1 0 116 140 0 0 0
4647 COMMIT:
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
4649 device binfmt_misc mounted on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc with fstype binfmt_misc
4651 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
4653 <p
>The key number to look at is the third number in the per-op list.
4654 It is the number of NFS timeouts experiences per file system
4655 operation. Here
22 write timeouts and
5 access timeouts. If these
4656 numbers are increasing, I believe the machine is experiencing NFS
4657 hang. Unfortunately the timeout value do not start to increase right
4658 away. The NFS operations need to time out first, and this can take a
4659 while. The exact timeout value depend on the setup. For example the
4660 defaults for TCP and UDP mount points are quite different, and the
4661 timeout value is affected by the soft, hard, timeo and retrans NFS
4662 mount options.
</p
>
4664 <p
>The only way I have been able to get working on Debian and RedHat
4665 Enterprise Linux for getting the timeout count is to peek in /proc/.
4667 <ahref=
"http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-
01/
816-
4555/netmonitor-
12/index.html
">Solaris
4668 10 System Administration Guide: Network Services
</a
>, the
'nfsstat -c
'
4669 command can be used to get these timeout values. But this do not work
4670 on Linux, as far as I can tell. I
4671 <ahref=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
857043">asked Debian about this
</a
>,
4672 but have not seen any replies yet.
</p
>
4674 <p
>Is there a better way to figure out if a Linux NFS client is
4675 experiencing NFS hangs? Is there a way to detect which processes are
4676 affected? Is there a way to get the NFS mount going quickly once the
4677 network problem causing the NFS hang has been cleared? I would very
4678 much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.
</p
>
4683 <title>How does it feel to be wiretapped, when you should be doing the wiretapping...
</title>
4684 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_does_it_feel_to_be_wiretapped__when_you_should_be_doing_the_wiretapping___.html
</link>
4685 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_does_it_feel_to_be_wiretapped__when_you_should_be_doing_the_wiretapping___.html
</guid>
4686 <pubDate>Wed,
8 Mar
2017 11:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4687 <description><p
>So the new president in the United States of America claim to be
4688 surprised to discover that he was wiretapped during the election
4689 before he was elected president. He even claim this must be illegal.
4690 Well, doh, if it is one thing the confirmations from Snowden
4691 documented, it is that the entire population in USA is wiretapped, one
4692 way or another. Of course the president candidates were wiretapped,
4693 alongside the senators, judges and the rest of the people in USA.
</p
>
4695 <p
>Next, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ask the Department of
4696 Justice to go public rejecting the claims that Donald Trump was
4697 wiretapped illegally. I fail to see the relevance, given that I am
4698 sure the surveillance industry in USA believe they have all the legal
4699 backing they need to conduct mass surveillance on the entire
4702 <p
>There is even the director of the FBI stating that he never saw an
4703 order requesting wiretapping of Donald Trump. That is not very
4704 surprising, given how the FISA court work, with all its activity being
4705 secret. Perhaps he only heard about it?
</p
>
4707 <p
>What I find most sad in this story is how Norwegian journalists
4708 present it. In a news reports the other day in the radio from the
4709 Norwegian National broadcasting Company (NRK), I heard the journalist
4710 claim that
'the FBI denies any wiretapping
', while the reality is that
4711 'the FBI denies any illegal wiretapping
'. There is a fundamental and
4712 important difference, and it make me sad that the journalists are
4713 unable to grasp it.
</p
>
4715 <p
><strong
>Update
2017-
03-
13:
</strong
> Look like
4716 <a href=
"https://theintercept.com/
2017/
03/
13/rand-paul-is-right-nsa-routinely-monitors-americans-communications-without-warrants/
">The
4717 Intercept report that US Senator Rand Paul confirm what I state above
</a
>.
</p
>
4722 <title>Norwegian Bokmål translation of The Debian Administrator
's Handbook complete, proofreading in progress
</title>
4723 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_complete__proofreading_in_progress.html
</link>
4724 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_complete__proofreading_in_progress.html
</guid>
4725 <pubDate>Fri,
3 Mar
2017 14:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4726 <description><p
>For almost a year now, we have been working on making a Norwegian
4727 Bokmål edition of
<a href=
"https://debian-handbook.info/
">The Debian
4728 Administrator
's Handbook
</a
>. Now, thanks to the tireless effort of
4729 Ole-Erik, Ingrid and Andreas, the initial translation is complete, and
4730 we are working on the proof reading to ensure consistent language and
4731 use of correct computer science terms. The plan is to make the book
4732 available on paper, as well as in electronic form. For that to
4733 happen, the proof reading must be completed and all the figures need
4734 to be translated. If you want to help out, get in touch.
</p
>
4736 <p
><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-handbook/debian-handbook-nb-NO.pdf
">A
4738 fresh PDF edition
</a
> in A4 format (the final book will have smaller
4739 pages) of the book created every morning is available for
4740 proofreading. If you find any errors, please
4741 <a href=
"https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/
">visit
4742 Weblate and correct the error
</a
>. The
4743 <a href=
"http://l.github.io/debian-handbook/stat/nb-NO/index.html
">state
4744 of the translation including figures
</a
> is a useful source for those
4745 provide Norwegian bokmål screen shots and figures.
</p
>
4750 <title>Unlimited randomness with the ChaosKey?
</title>
4751 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlimited_randomness_with_the_ChaosKey_.html
</link>
4752 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlimited_randomness_with_the_ChaosKey_.html
</guid>
4753 <pubDate>Wed,
1 Mar
2017 20:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4754 <description><p
>A few days ago I ordered a small batch of
4755 <a href=
"http://altusmetrum.org/ChaosKey/
">the ChaosKey
</a
>, a small
4756 USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith
4757 Packard. Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it
4758 work great! According to its designers, to get it to work out of the
4759 box, you need the Linux kernel version
4.1 or later. I tested on a
4760 Debian Stretch machine (kernel version
4.9), and there it worked just
4761 fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly. I wrote a small
4762 test oneliner to test. It first print the current entropy level,
4763 drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds.
4764 Here is the situation without the ChaosKey inserted:
</p
>
4766 <blockquote
><pre
>
4767 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
4768 dd bs=
1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=
1; \
4769 for n in $(seq
1 5); do \
4770 cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
4776 28 byte kopiert,
0,
000264565 s,
106 kB/s
4783 </pre
></blockquote
>
4785 <p
>The entropy level increases by
3-
4 every second. In such case any
4786 application requiring random bits (like a HTTPS enabled web server)
4787 will halt and wait for more entrpy. And here is the situation with
4788 the ChaosKey inserted:
</p
>
4790 <blockquote
><pre
>
4791 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
4792 dd bs=
1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=
1; \
4793 for n in $(seq
1 5); do \
4794 cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
4800 104 byte kopiert,
0,
000487647 s,
213 kB/s
4807 </pre
></blockquote
>
4809 <p
>Quite the difference. :) I bought a few more than I need, in case
4810 someone want to buy one here in Norway. :)
</p
>
4812 <p
>Update: The dongle was presented at Debconf last year. You might
4813 find
<a href=
"https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/
94/
">the talk
4814 recording illuminating
</a
>. It explains exactly what the source of
4815 randomness is, if you are unable to spot it from the schema drawing
4816 available from the ChaosKey web site linked at the start of this blog
4822 <title>Detect OOXML files with undefined behaviour?
</title>
4823 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detect_OOXML_files_with_undefined_behaviour_.html
</link>
4824 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detect_OOXML_files_with_undefined_behaviour_.html
</guid>
4825 <pubDate>Tue,
21 Feb
2017 00:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4826 <description><p
>I just noticed
4827 <a href=
"http://www.arkivrad.no/aktuelt/riksarkivarens-forskrift-pa-horing
">the
4828 new Norwegian proposal for archiving rules in the goverment
</a
> list
4829 <a href=
"http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-
376.htm
">ECMA-
376</a
>
4830 / ISO/IEC
29500 (aka OOXML) as valid formats to put in long term
4831 storage. Luckily such files will only be accepted based on
4832 pre-approval from the National Archive. Allowing OOXML files to be
4833 used for long term storage might seem like a good idea as long as we
4834 forget that there are plenty of ways for a
"valid
" OOXML document to
4835 have content with no defined interpretation in the standard, which
4836 lead to a question and an idea.
</p
>
4838 <p
>Is there any tool to detect if a OOXML document depend on such
4839 undefined behaviour? It would be useful for the National Archive (and
4840 anyone else interested in verifying that a document is well defined)
4841 to have such tool available when considering to approve the use of
4842 OOXML. I
'm aware of the
4843 <a href=
"https://github.com/arlm/officeotron/
">officeotron OOXML
4844 validator
</a
>, but do not know how complete it is nor if it will
4845 report use of undefined behaviour. Are there other similar tools
4846 available? Please send me an email if you know of any such tool.
</p
>
4851 <title>Ruling ignored our objections to the seizure of popcorn-time.no (#domstolkontroll)
</title>
4852 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ruling_ignored_our_objections_to_the_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no___domstolkontroll_.html
</link>
4853 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ruling_ignored_our_objections_to_the_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no___domstolkontroll_.html
</guid>
4854 <pubDate>Mon,
13 Feb
2017 21:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4855 <description><p
>A few days ago, we received the ruling from
4856 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_day_in_court_challenging_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no_for__domstolkontroll.html
">my
4857 day in court
</a
>. The case in question is a challenge of the seizure
4858 of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no. The ruling simply did not mention
4859 most of our arguments, and seemed to take everything ØKOKRIM said at
4860 face value, ignoring our demonstration and explanations. But it is
4861 hard to tell for sure, as we still have not seen most of the documents
4862 in the case and thus were unprepared and unable to contradict several
4863 of the claims made in court by the opposition. We are considering an
4864 appeal, but it is partly a question of funding, as it is costing us
4865 quite a bit to pay for our lawyer. If you want to help, please
4866 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml
">donate to the
4867 NUUG defense fund
</a
>.
</p
>
4869 <p
>The details of the case, as far as we know it, is available in
4871 <a href=
"https://www.nuug.no/news/tags/dns-domenebeslag/
">the NUUG
4872 blog
</a
>. This also include
4873 <a href=
"https://www.nuug.no/news/Avslag_etter_rettslig_h_ring_om_DNS_beslaget___vurderer_veien_videre.shtml
">the
4874 ruling itself
</a
>.
</p
>
4879 <title>A day in court challenging seizure of popcorn-time.no for #domstolkontroll
</title>
4880 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_day_in_court_challenging_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no_for__domstolkontroll.html
</link>
4881 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_day_in_court_challenging_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no_for__domstolkontroll.html
</guid>
4882 <pubDate>Fri,
3 Feb
2017 11:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4883 <description><p align=
"center
"><img width=
"70%
" src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2017-
02-
01-popcorn-time-in-court.jpeg
"></p
>
4885 <p
>On Wednesday, I spent the entire day in court in Follo Tingrett
4886 representing
<a href=
"https://www.nuug.no/
">the member association
4887 NUUG
</a
>, alongside
<a href=
"https://www.efn.no/
">the member
4888 association EFN
</a
> and
<a href=
"http://www.imc.no
">the DNS registrar
4889 IMC
</a
>, challenging the seizure of the DNS name popcorn-time.no. It
4890 was interesting to sit in a court of law for the first time in my
4891 life. Our team can be seen in the picture above: attorney Ola
4892 Tellesbø, EFN board member Tom Fredrik Blenning, IMC CEO Morten Emil
4893 Eriksen and NUUG board member Petter Reinholdtsen.
</p
>
4895 <p
><a href=
"http://www.domstol.no/no/Enkelt-domstol/follo-tingrett/Nar-gar-rettssaken/Beramming/?cid=AAAA1701301512081262234UJFBVEZZZZZEJBAvtale
">The
4896 case at hand
</a
> is that the Norwegian National Authority for
4897 Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime (aka
4898 Økokrim) decided on their own, to seize a DNS domain early last
4899 year, without following
4900 <a href=
"https://www.norid.no/no/regelverk/navnepolitikk/#link12
">the
4901 official policy of the Norwegian DNS authority
</a
> which require a
4902 court decision. The web site in question was a site covering Popcorn
4903 Time. And Popcorn Time is the name of a technology with both legal
4904 and illegal applications. Popcorn Time is a client combining
4905 searching a Bittorrent directory available on the Internet with
4906 downloading/distribute content via Bittorrent and playing the
4907 downloaded content on screen. It can be used illegally if it is used
4908 to distribute content against the will of the right holder, but it can
4909 also be used legally to play a lot of content, for example the
4911 <a href=
"https://archive.org/details/movies
">available from the
4912 Internet Archive
</a
> or the collection
4913 <a href=
"http://vodo.net/films/
">available from Vodo
</a
>. We created
4914 <a href=
"magnet:?xt=urn:btih:
86c1802af5a667ca56d3918aecb7d3c0f7173084
&dn=PresentasjonFolloTingrett.mov
&tr=udp%
3A%
2F%
2Fpublic.popcorn-tracker.org%
3A6969%
2Fannounce
">a
4915 video demonstrating legally use of Popcorn Time
</a
> and played it in
4916 Court. It can of course be downloaded using Bittorrent.
</p
>
4918 <p
>I did not quite know what to expect from a day in court. The
4919 government held on to their version of the story and we held on to
4920 ours, and I hope the judge is able to make sense of it all. We will
4921 know in two weeks time. Unfortunately I do not have high hopes, as
4922 the Government have the upper hand here with more knowledge about the
4923 case, better training in handling criminal law and in general higher
4924 standing in the courts than fairly unknown DNS registrar and member
4925 associations. It is expensive to be right also in Norway. So far the
4926 case have cost more than NOK
70 000,-. To help fund the case, NUUG
4927 and EFN have asked for donations, and managed to collect around NOK
25
4928 000,- so far. Given the presentation from the Government, I expect
4929 the government to appeal if the case go our way. And if the case do
4930 not go our way, I hope we have enough funding to appeal.
</p
>
4932 <p
>From the other side came two people from Økokrim. On the benches,
4933 appearing to be part of the group from the government were two people
4934 from the Simonsen Vogt Wiik lawyer office, and three others I am not
4935 quite sure who was. Økokrim had proposed to present two witnesses
4936 from The Motion Picture Association, but this was rejected because
4937 they did not speak Norwegian and it was a bit late to bring in a
4938 translator, but perhaps the two from MPA were present anyway. All
4939 seven appeared to know each other. Good to see the case is take
4940 seriously.
</p
>
4942 <p
>If you, like me, believe the courts should be involved before a DNS
4943 domain is hijacked by the government, or you believe the Popcorn Time
4944 technology have a lot of useful and legal applications, I suggest you
4945 too
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml
">donate to
4946 the NUUG defense fund
</a
>. Both Bitcoin and bank transfer are
4947 available. If NUUG get more than we need for the legal action (very
4948 unlikely), the rest will be spend promoting free software, open
4949 standards and unix-like operating systems in Norway, so no matter what
4950 happens the money will be put to good use.
</p
>
4952 <p
>If you want to lean more about the case, I recommend you check out
4953 <a href=
"https://www.nuug.no/news/tags/dns-domenebeslag/
">the blog
4954 posts from NUUG covering the case
</a
>. They cover the legal arguments
4955 on both sides.
</p
>
4960 <title>Where did that package go?
&mdash; geolocated IP traceroute
</title>
4961 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Where_did_that_package_go___mdash__geolocated_IP_traceroute.html
</link>
4962 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Where_did_that_package_go___mdash__geolocated_IP_traceroute.html
</guid>
4963 <pubDate>Mon,
9 Jan
2017 12:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4964 <description><p
>Did you ever wonder where the web trafic really flow to reach the
4965 web servers, and who own the network equipment it is flowing through?
4966 It is possible to get a glimpse of this from using traceroute, but it
4967 is hard to find all the details. Many years ago, I wrote a system to
4968 map the Norwegian Internet (trying to figure out if our plans for a
4969 network game service would get low enough latency, and who we needed
4970 to talk to about setting up game servers close to the users. Back
4971 then I used traceroute output from many locations (I asked my friends
4972 to run a script and send me their traceroute output) to create the
4973 graph and the map. The output from traceroute typically look like
4976 <p
><pre
>
4977 traceroute to www.stortinget.no (
85.88.67.10),
30 hops max,
60 byte packets
4978 1 uio-gw10.uio.no (
129.240.202.1)
0.447 ms
0.486 ms
0.621 ms
4979 2 uio-gw8.uio.no (
129.240.24.229)
0.467 ms
0.578 ms
0.675 ms
4980 3 oslo-gw1.uninett.no (
128.39.65.17)
0.385 ms
0.373 ms
0.358 ms
4981 4 te3-
1-
2.br1.fn3.as2116.net (
193.156.90.3)
1.174 ms
1.172 ms
1.153 ms
4982 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
4983 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
4984 7 89.191.10.146 (
89.191.10.146)
0.931 ms
0.917 ms
0.955 ms
4988 </pre
></p
>
4990 <p
>This show the DNS names and IP addresses of (at least some of the)
4991 network equipment involved in getting the data traffic from me to the
4992 www.stortinget.no server, and how long it took in milliseconds for a
4993 package to reach the equipment and return to me. Three packages are
4994 sent, and some times the packages do not follow the same path. This
4995 is shown for hop
5, where three different IP addresses replied to the
4996 traceroute request.
</p
>
4998 <p
>There are many ways to measure trace routes. Other good traceroute
4999 implementations I use are traceroute (using ICMP packages) mtr (can do
5000 both ICMP, UDP and TCP) and scapy (python library with ICMP, UDP, TCP
5001 traceroute and a lot of other capabilities). All of them are easily
5002 available in
<a href=
"https://www.debian.org/
">Debian
</a
>.
</p
>
5004 <p
>This time around, I wanted to know the geographic location of
5005 different route points, to visualize how visiting a web page spread
5006 information about the visit to a lot of servers around the globe. The
5007 background is that a web site today often will ask the browser to get
5008 from many servers the parts (for example HTML, JSON, fonts,
5009 JavaScript, CSS, video) required to display the content. This will
5010 leak information about the visit to those controlling these servers
5011 and anyone able to peek at the data traffic passing by (like your ISP,
5012 the ISPs backbone provider, FRA, GCHQ, NSA and others).
</p
>
5014 <p
>Lets pick an example, the Norwegian parliament web site
5015 www.stortinget.no. It is read daily by all members of parliament and
5016 their staff, as well as political journalists, activits and many other
5017 citizens of Norway. A visit to the www.stortinget.no web site will
5018 ask your browser to contact
8 other servers: ajax.googleapis.com,
5019 insights.hotjar.com, script.hotjar.com, static.hotjar.com,
5020 stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google-analytics.com,
5021 www.googletagmanager.com and www.netigate.se. I extracted this by
5022 asking
<a href=
"http://phantomjs.org/
">PhantomJS
</a
> to visit the
5023 Stortinget web page and tell me all the URLs PhantomJS downloaded to
5024 render the page (in HAR format using
5025 <a href=
"https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/master/examples/netsniff.js
">their
5026 netsniff example
</a
>. I am very grateful to Gorm for showing me how
5027 to do this). My goal is to visualize network traces to all IP
5028 addresses behind these DNS names, do show where visitors personal
5029 information is spread when visiting the page.
</p
>
5031 <p align=
"center
"><a href=
"www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml
"><img
5032 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
>
5034 <p
>When I had a look around for options, I could not find any good
5035 free software tools to do this, and decided I needed my own traceroute
5036 wrapper outputting KML based on locations looked up using GeoIP. KML
5037 is easy to work with and easy to generate, and understood by several
5038 of the GIS tools I have available. I got good help from by NUUG
5039 colleague Anders Einar with this, and the result can be seen in
5040 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/kmltraceroute
">my
5041 kmltraceroute git repository
</a
>. Unfortunately, the quality of the
5042 free GeoIP databases I could find (and the for-pay databases my
5043 friends had access to) is not up to the task. The IP addresses of
5044 central Internet infrastructure would typically be placed near the
5045 controlling companies main office, and not where the router is really
5046 located, as you can see from
<a href=
"www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml
">the
5047 KML file I created
</a
> using the GeoLite City dataset from MaxMind.
5049 <p align=
"center
"><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2017-
01-
09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg
"><img
5050 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
>
5052 <p
>I also had a look at the visual traceroute graph created by
5053 <a href=
"http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/
">the scrapy project
</a
>,
5054 showing IP network ownership (aka AS owner) for the IP address in
5056 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2017-
01-
09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg
">The
5057 graph display a lot of useful information about the traceroute in SVG
5058 format
</a
>, and give a good indication on who control the network
5059 equipment involved, but it do not include geolocation. This graph
5060 make it possible to see the information is made available at least for
5061 UNINETT, Catchcom, Stortinget, Nordunet, Google, Amazon, Telia, Level
5062 3 Communications and NetDNA.
</p
>
5064 <p align=
"center
"><a href=
"https://geotraceroute.com/index.php?node=
4&host=www.stortinget.no
"><img
5065 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
>
5067 <p
>In the process, I came across the
5068 <a href=
"https://geotraceroute.com/
">web service GeoTraceroute
</a
> by
5069 Salim Gasmi. Its methology of combining guesses based on DNS names,
5070 various location databases and finally use latecy times to rule out
5071 candidate locations seemed to do a very good job of guessing correct
5072 geolocation. But it could only do one trace at the time, did not have
5073 a sensor in Norway and did not make the geolocations easily available
5074 for postprocessing. So I contacted the developer and asked if he
5075 would be willing to share the code (he refused until he had time to
5076 clean it up), but he was interested in providing the geolocations in a
5077 machine readable format, and willing to set up a sensor in Norway. So
5078 since yesterday, it is possible to run traces from Norway in this
5079 service thanks to a sensor node set up by
5080 <a href=
"https://www.nuug.no/
">the NUUG assosiation
</a
>, and get the
5081 trace in KML format for further processing.
</p
>
5083 <p align=
"center
"><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2017-
01-
09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.kml
"><img
5084 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
>
5086 <p
>Here we can see a lot of trafic passes Sweden on its way to
5087 Denmark, Germany, Holland and Ireland. Plenty of places where the
5088 Snowden confirmations verified the traffic is read by various actors
5089 without your best interest as their top priority.
</p
>
5091 <p
>Combining KML files is trivial using a text editor, so I could loop
5092 over all the hosts behind the urls imported by www.stortinget.no and
5093 ask for the KML file from GeoTraceroute, and create a combined KML
5094 file with all the traces (unfortunately only one of the IP addresses
5095 behind the DNS name is traced this time. To get them all, one would
5096 have to request traces using IP number instead of DNS names from
5097 GeoTraceroute). That might be the next step in this project.
</p
>
5099 <p
>Armed with these tools, I find it a lot easier to figure out where
5100 the IP traffic moves and who control the boxes involved in moving it.
5101 And every time the link crosses for example the Swedish border, we can
5102 be sure Swedish Signal Intelligence (FRA) is listening, as GCHQ do in
5103 Britain and NSA in USA and cables around the globe. (Hm, what should
5104 we tell them? :) Keep that in mind if you ever send anything
5105 unencrypted over the Internet.
</p
>
5107 <p
>PS: KML files are drawn using
5108 <a href=
"http://ivanrublev.me/kml/
">the KML viewer from Ivan
5109 Rublev
<a/
>, as it was less cluttered than the local Linux application
5110 Marble. There are heaps of other options too.
</p
>
5112 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5113 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5114 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
5119 <title>Introducing ical-archiver to split out old iCalendar entries
</title>
5120 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Introducing_ical_archiver_to_split_out_old_iCalendar_entries.html
</link>
5121 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Introducing_ical_archiver_to_split_out_old_iCalendar_entries.html
</guid>
5122 <pubDate>Wed,
4 Jan
2017 12:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
5123 <description><p
>Do you have a large
<a href=
"https://icalendar.org/
">iCalendar
</a
>
5124 file with lots of old entries, and would like to archive them to save
5125 space and resources? At least those of us using KOrganizer know that
5126 turning on and off an event set become slower and slower the more
5127 entries are in the set. While working on migrating our calendars to a
5128 <a href=
"http://radicale.org/
">Radicale CalDAV server
</a
> on our
5129 <a href=
"https://freedomboxfoundation.org/
">Freedombox server
</a/
>, my
5130 loved one wondered if I could find a way to split up the calendar file
5131 she had in KOrganizer, and I set out to write a tool. I spent a few
5132 days writing and polishing the system, and it is now ready for general
5134 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/ical-archiver
">code for
5135 ical-archiver
</a
> is publicly available from a git repository on
5136 github. The system is written in Python and depend on
5137 <a href=
"http://eventable.github.io/vobject/
">the vobject Python
5138 module
</a
>.
</p
>
5140 <p
>To use it, locate the iCalendar file you want to operate on and
5141 give it as an argument to the ical-archiver script. This will
5142 generate a set of new files, one file per component type per year for
5143 all components expiring more than two years in the past. The vevent,
5144 vtodo and vjournal entries are handled by the script. The remaining
5145 entries are stored in a
'remaining
' file.
</p
>
5147 <p
>This is what a test run can look like:
5149 <p
><pre
>
5150 % ical-archiver t/
2004-
2016.ics
5154 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2004.ics
5155 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2005.ics
5156 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2006.ics
5157 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2007.ics
5158 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2008.ics
5159 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2009.ics
5160 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2010.ics
5161 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2011.ics
5162 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2012.ics
5163 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2013.ics
5164 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2014.ics
5165 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vjournal-
2007.ics
5166 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vjournal-
2011.ics
5167 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vtodo-
2012.ics
5168 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-remaining.ics
5170 </pre
></p
>
5172 <p
>As you can see, the original file is untouched and new files are
5173 written with names derived from the original file. If you are happy
5174 with their content, the *-remaining.ics file can replace the original
5175 the the others can be archived or imported as historical calendar
5176 collections.
</p
>
5178 <p
>The script should probably be improved a bit. The error handling
5179 when discovering broken entries is not good, and I am not sure yet if
5180 it make sense to split different entry types into separate files or
5181 not. The program is thus likely to change. If you find it
5182 interesting, please get in touch. :)
</p
>
5184 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5185 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5186 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
5191 <title>Appstream just learned how to map hardware to packages too!
</title>
5192 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Appstream_just_learned_how_to_map_hardware_to_packages_too_.html
</link>
5193 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Appstream_just_learned_how_to_map_hardware_to_packages_too_.html
</guid>
5194 <pubDate>Fri,
23 Dec
2016 10:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
5195 <description><p
>I received a very nice Christmas present today. As my regular
5196 readers probably know, I have been working on the
5197 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram
">the Isenkram
5198 system
</a
> for many years. The goal of the Isenkram system is to make
5199 it easier for users to figure out what to install to get a given piece
5200 of hardware to work in Debian, and a key part of this system is a way
5201 to map hardware to packages. Isenkram have its own mapping database,
5202 and also uses data provided by each package using the AppStream
5203 metadata format. And today,
5204 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/appstream
">AppStream
</a
> in
5205 Debian learned to look up hardware the same way Isenkram is doing it,
5206 ie using fnmatch():
</p
>
5208 <p
><pre
>
5209 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias \
5210 usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
5211 Identifier: pymissile [generic]
5213 Summary: Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
5215 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias usb:v0694p0002d0000
5216 Identifier: libnxt [generic]
5218 Summary: utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick
5221 Identifier: t2n [generic]
5223 Summary: Simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
5226 Identifier: python-nxt [generic]
5228 Summary: Python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
5231 Identifier: nbc [generic]
5233 Summary: C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
5236 </pre
></p
>
5238 <p
>A similar query can be done using the combined AppStream and
5239 Isenkram databases using the isenkram-lookup tool:
</p
>
5241 <p
><pre
>
5242 % isenkram-lookup usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
5244 % isenkram-lookup usb:v0694p0002d0000
5250 </pre
></p
>
5252 <p
>You can find modalias values relevant for your machine using
5253 <tt
>cat $(find /sys/devices/ -name modalias)
</tt
>.
5255 <p
>If you want to make this system a success and help Debian users
5256 make the most of the hardware they have, please
5257 help
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines
">add
5258 AppStream metadata for your package following the guidelines
</a
>
5259 documented in the wiki. So far only
11 packages provide such
5260 information, among the several hundred hardware specific packages in
5261 Debian. The Isenkram database on the other hand contain
101 packages,
5262 mostly related to USB dongles. Most of the packages with hardware
5263 mapping in AppStream are LEGO Mindstorms related, because I have, as
5264 part of my involvement in
5265 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners
">the Debian LEGO
5266 team
</a
> given priority to making sure LEGO users get proposed the
5267 complete set of packages in Debian for that particular hardware. The
5268 team also got a nice Christmas present today. The
5269 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nxt-firmware
">nxt-firmware
5270 package
</a
> made it into Debian. With this package in place, it is
5271 now possible to use the LEGO Mindstorms NXT unit with only free
5272 software, as the nxt-firmware package contain the source and firmware
5273 binaries for the NXT brick.
</p
>
5275 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5276 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5277 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
5282 <title>Isenkram updated with a lot more hardware-package mappings
</title>
5283 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_updated_with_a_lot_more_hardware_package_mappings.html
</link>
5284 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_updated_with_a_lot_more_hardware_package_mappings.html
</guid>
5285 <pubDate>Tue,
20 Dec
2016 11:
55:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
5286 <description><p
><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram
">The Isenkram
5287 system
</a
> I wrote two years ago to make it easier in Debian to find
5288 and install packages to get your hardware dongles to work, is still
5289 going strong. It is a system to look up the hardware present on or
5290 connected to the current system, and map the hardware to Debian
5291 packages. It can either be done using the tools in isenkram-cli or
5292 using the user space daemon in the isenkram package. The latter will
5293 notify you, when inserting new hardware, about what packages to
5294 install to get the dongle working. It will even provide a button to
5295 click on to ask packagekit to install the packages.
</p
>
5297 <p
>Here is an command line example from my Thinkpad laptop:
</p
>
5299 <p
><pre
>
5316 </pre
></p
>
5318 <p
>It can also list the firware package providing firmware requested
5319 by the load kernel modules, which in my case is an empty list because
5320 I have all the firmware my machine need:
5322 <p
><pre
>
5323 % /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
5324 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules. exiting
5326 </pre
></p
>
5328 <p
>The last few days I had a look at several of the around
250
5329 packages in Debian with udev rules. These seem like good candidates
5330 to install when a given hardware dongle is inserted, and I found
5331 several that should be proposed by isenkram. I have not had time to
5332 check all of them, but am happy to report that now there are
97
5333 packages packages mapped to hardware by Isenkram.
11 of these
5334 packages provide hardware mapping using AppStream, while the rest are
5335 listed in the modaliases file provided in isenkram.
</p
>
5337 <p
>These are the packages with hardware mappings at the moment. The
5338 <strong
>marked packages
</strong
> are also announcing their hardware
5339 support using AppStream, for everyone to use:
</p
>
5341 <p
>air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, argyll,
5342 <strong
>array-info
</strong
>, avarice, avrdude, b43-fwcutter,
5343 bit-babbler, bluez, bluez-firmware,
<strong
>brltty
</strong
>,
5344 <strong
>broadcom-sta-dkms
</strong
>, calibre, cgminer, cheese, colord,
5345 <strong
>colorhug-client
</strong
>, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux,
5346 dfu-util, dolphin-emu, ekeyd, ethtool, firmware-ipw2x00, fprintd,
5347 fprintd-demo,
<strong
>galileo
</strong
>, gkrellm-thinkbat, gphoto2,
5348 gpsbabel, gpsbabel-gui, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, gr-fcdproplus,
5349 gr-osmosdr, gtkpod, hackrf, hdapsd, hdmi2usb-udev, hpijs-ppds, hplip,
5350 ipw3945-source, ipw3945d, kde-config-tablet, kinect-audio-setup,
5351 <strong
>libnxt
</strong
>, libpam-fprintd,
<strong
>lomoco
</strong
>,
5352 madwimax, minidisc-utils, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mtkbabel,
5353 <strong
>nbc
</strong
>,
<strong
>nqc
</strong
>, nut-hal-drivers, ola,
5354 open-vm-toolbox, open-vm-tools, openambit, pcgminer, pcmciautils,
5355 pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, printer-driver-splix,
5356 <strong
>pymissile
</strong
>, python-nxt, qlandkartegt,
5357 qlandkartegt-garmin, rosegarden, rt2x00-source, sispmctl,
5358 soapysdr-module-hackrf, solaar, squeak-plugins-scratch, sunxi-tools,
5359 <strong
>t2n
</strong
>, thinkfan, thinkfinger-tools, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms,
5360 tp-smapi-source, tpb, tucnak, uhd-host, usbmuxd, viking,
5361 virtualbox-ose-guest-x11, w1retap, xawtv, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse,
5362 xserver-xorg-input-wacom, xserver-xorg-video-qxl,
5363 xserver-xorg-video-vmware, yubikey-personalization and
5364 zd1211-firmware
</p
>
5366 <p
>If you know of other packages, please let me know with a wishlist
5367 bug report against the isenkram-cli package, and ask the package
5369 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines
">add AppStream
5370 metadata according to the guidelines
</a
> to provide the information
5371 for everyone. In time, I hope to get rid of the isenkram specific
5372 hardware mapping and depend exclusively on AppStream.
</p
>
5374 <p
>Note, the AppStream metadata for broadcom-sta-dkms is matching too
5375 much hardware, and suggest that the package with with any ethernet
5376 card. See
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
838735">bug #
838735</a
> for
5377 the details. I hope the maintainer find time to address it soon. In
5378 the mean time I provide an override in isenkram.
</p
>
5383 <title>Oolite, a life in space as vagabond and mercenary - nice free software
</title>
5384 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oolite__a_life_in_space_as_vagabond_and_mercenary___nice_free_software.html
</link>
5385 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oolite__a_life_in_space_as_vagabond_and_mercenary___nice_free_software.html
</guid>
5386 <pubDate>Sun,
11 Dec
2016 11:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
5387 <description><p align=
"center
"><img width=
"70%
" src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2016-
12-
11-nice-oolite.png
"/
></p
>
5389 <p
>In my early years, I played
5390 <a href=
"http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Classic_Elite
">the epic game
5391 Elite
</a
> on my PC. I spent many months trading and fighting in
5392 space, and reached the
'elite
' fighting status before I moved on. The
5393 original Elite game was available on Commodore
64 and the IBM PC
5394 edition I played had a
64 KB executable. I am still impressed today
5395 that the authors managed to squeeze both a
3D engine and details about
5396 more than
2000 planet systems across
7 galaxies into a binary so
5399 <p
>I have known about
<a href=
"http://www.oolite.org/
">the free
5400 software game Oolite inspired by Elite
</a
> for a while, but did not
5401 really have time to test it properly until a few days ago. It was
5402 great to discover that my old knowledge about trading routes were
5403 still valid. But my fighting and flying abilities were gone, so I had
5404 to retrain to be able to dock on a space station. And I am still not
5405 able to make much resistance when I am attacked by pirates, so I
5406 bougth and mounted the most powerful laser in the rear to be able to
5407 put up at least some resistance while fleeing for my life. :)
</p
>
5409 <p
>When playing Elite in the late eighties, I had to discover
5410 everything on my own, and I had long lists of prices seen on different
5411 planets to be able to decide where to trade what. This time I had the
5413 <a href=
"http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Main_Page
">Elite wiki
</a
>,
5414 where information about each planet is easily available with common
5415 price ranges and suggested trading routes. This improved my ability
5416 to earn money and I have been able to earn enough to buy a lot of
5417 useful equipent in a few days. I believe I originally played for
5418 months before I could get a docking computer, while now I could get it
5419 after less then a week.
</p
>
5421 <p
>If you like science fiction and dreamed of a life as a vagabond in
5422 space, you should try out Oolite. It is available for Linux, MacOSX
5423 and Windows, and is included in Debian and derivatives since
2011.
</p
>
5425 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5426 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5427 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
5432 <title>Quicker Debian installations using eatmydata
</title>
5433 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html
</link>
5434 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html
</guid>
5435 <pubDate>Fri,
25 Nov
2016 14:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
5436 <description><p
>Two years ago, I did some experiments with eatmydata and the Debian
5437 installation system, observing how using
5438 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html
">eatmydata
5439 could speed up the installation
</a
> quite a bit. My testing measured
5440 speedup around
20-
40 percent for Debian Edu, where we install around
5441 1000 packages from within the installer. The eatmydata package
5442 provide a way to disable/delay file system flushing. This is a bit
5443 risky in the general case, as files that should be stored on disk will
5444 stay only in memory a bit longer than expected, causing problems if a
5445 machine crashes at an inconvenient time. But for an installation, if
5446 the machine crashes during installation the process is normally
5447 restarted, and avoiding disk operations as much as possible to speed
5448 up the process make perfect sense.
5450 <p
>I added code in the Debian Edu specific installation code to enable
5451 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libeatmydata
">eatmydata
</a
>,
5452 but did not have time to push it any further. But a few months ago I
5453 picked it up again and worked with the libeatmydata package maintainer
5454 Mattia Rizzolo to make it easier for everyone to get this installation
5455 speedup in Debian. Thanks to our cooperation There is now an
5456 eatmydata-udeb package in Debian testing and unstable, and simply
5457 enabling/installing it in debian-installer (d-i) is enough to get the
5458 quicker installations. It can be enabled using preseeding. The
5459 following untested kernel argument should do the trick:
</p
>
5461 <blockquote
><pre
>
5462 preseed/early_command=
"anna-install eatmydata-udeb
"
5463 </pre
></blockquote
>
5465 <p
>This should ask d-i to install the package inside the d-i
5466 environment early in the installation sequence. Having it installed
5467 in d-i in turn will make sure the relevant scripts are called just
5468 after debootstrap filled /target/ with the freshly installed Debian
5469 system to configure apt to run dpkg with eatmydata. This is enough to
5470 speed up the installation process. There is a proposal to
5471 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
841153">extend the idea a bit further
5472 by using /etc/ld.so.preload instead of apt.conf
</a
>, but I have not
5473 tested its impact.
</p
>
5479 <title>Coz profiler for multi-threaded software is now in Debian
</title>
5480 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_profiler_for_multi_threaded_software_is_now_in_Debian.html
</link>
5481 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_profiler_for_multi_threaded_software_is_now_in_Debian.html
</guid>
5482 <pubDate>Sun,
13 Nov
2016 12:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
5483 <description><p
><a href=
"http://coz-profiler.org/
">The Coz profiler
</a
>, a nice
5484 profiler able to run benchmarking experiments on the instrumented
5485 multi-threaded program, finally
5486 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/coz-profiler
">made it into
5487 Debian unstable yesterday
</A
>. Lluís Vilanova and I have spent many
5489 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html
">I
5490 blogged about the coz tool
</a
> in August working with upstream to make
5491 it suitable for Debian. There are still issues with clang
5492 compatibility, inline assembly only working x86 and minimized
5493 JavaScript libraries.
</p
>
5495 <p
>To test it, install
'coz-profiler
' using apt and run it like this:
</p
>
5497 <p
><blockquote
>
5498 <tt
>coz run --- /path/to/binary-with-debug-info
</tt
>
5499 </blockquote
></p
>
5501 <p
>This will produce a profile.coz file in the current working
5502 directory with the profiling information. This is then given to a
5503 JavaScript application provided in the package and available from
5504 <a href=
"http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/
">a project web page
</a
>.
5505 To start the local copy, invoke it in a browser like this:
</p
>
5507 <p
><blockquote
>
5508 <tt
>sensible-browser /usr/share/coz-profiler/viewer/index.htm
</tt
>
5509 </blockquote
></p
>
5511 <p
>See the project home page and the
5512 <a href=
"https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger
">USENIX
5513 ;login: article on Coz
</a
> for more information on how it is
5519 <title>How to talk with your loved ones in private
</title>
5520 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_talk_with_your_loved_ones_in_private.html
</link>
5521 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_talk_with_your_loved_ones_in_private.html
</guid>
5522 <pubDate>Mon,
7 Nov
2016 10:
25:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
5523 <description><p
>A few days ago I ran a very biased and informal survey to get an
5524 idea about what options are being used to communicate with end to end
5525 encryption with friends and family. I explicitly asked people not to
5526 list options only used in a work setting. The background is the
5527 uneasy feeling I get when using Signal, a feeling shared by others as
5528 a blog post from Sander Venima about
5529 <a href=
"https://sandervenema.ch/
2016/
11/why-i-wont-recommend-signal-anymore/
">why
5530 he do not recommend Signal anymore
</a
> (with
5531 <a href=
"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=
12883410">feedback from
5532 the Signal author available from ycombinator
</a
>). I wanted an
5533 overview of the options being used, and hope to include those options
5534 in a less biased survey later on. So far I have not taken the time to
5535 look into the individual proposed systems. They range from text
5536 sharing web pages, via file sharing and email to instant messaging,
5537 VOIP and video conferencing. For those considering which system to
5538 use, it is also useful to have a look at
5539 <a href=
"https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard
">the EFF Secure
5540 messaging scorecard
</a
> which is slightly out of date but still
5541 provide valuable information.
</p
>
5543 <p
>So, on to the list. There were some used by many, some used by a
5544 few, some rarely used ones and a few mentioned but without anyone
5545 claiming to use them. Notice the grouping is in reality quite random
5546 given the biased self selected set of participants. First the ones
5547 used by many:
</p
>
5551 <li
><a href=
"https://whispersystems.org/
">Signal
</a
></li
>
5552 <li
>Email w/
<a href=
"http://openpgp.org/
">OpenPGP
</a
> (Enigmail, GPGSuite,etc)
</li
>
5553 <li
><a href=
"https://www.whatsapp.com/
">Whatsapp
</a
></li
>
5554 <li
>IRC w/
<a href=
"https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/
">OTR
</a
></li
>
5555 <li
>XMPP w/
<a href=
"https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/
">OTR
</a
></li
>
5559 <p
>Then the ones used by a few.
</p
>
5563 <li
><a href=
"https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page
">Mumble
</a
></li
>
5564 <li
>iMessage (included in iOS from Apple)
</li
>
5565 <li
><a href=
"https://telegram.org/
">Telegram
</a
></li
>
5566 <li
><a href=
"https://jitsi.org/
">Jitsi
</a
></li
>
5567 <li
><a href=
"https://keybase.io/download
">Keybase file
</a
></li
>
5571 <p
>Then the ones used by even fewer people
</p
>
5575 <li
><a href=
"https://ring.cx/
">Ring
</a
></li
>
5576 <li
><a href=
"https://bitmessage.org/
">Bitmessage
</a
></li
>
5577 <li
><a href=
"https://wire.com/
">Wire
</a
></li
>
5578 <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
>
5579 <li
><a href=
"https://matrix.org/
">Matrix
</a
></li
>
5580 <li
><a href=
"https://kontalk.org/
">Kontalk
</a
></li
>
5581 <li
><a href=
"https://
0bin.net/
">0bin
</a
> (encrypted pastebin)
</li
>
5582 <li
><a href=
"https://appear.in
">Appear.in
</a
></li
>
5583 <li
><a href=
"https://riot.im/
">riot
</a
></li
>
5584 <li
><a href=
"https://www.wickr.com/
">Wickr Me
</a
></li
>
5588 <p
>And finally the ones mentioned by not marked as used by
5589 anyone. This might be a mistake, perhaps the person adding the entry
5590 forgot to flag it as used?
</p
>
5594 <li
>Email w/Certificates
<a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME
">S/MIME
</a
></li
>
5595 <li
><a href=
"https://www.crypho.com/
">Crypho
</a
></li
>
5596 <li
><a href=
"https://cryptpad.fr/
">CryptPad
</a
></li
>
5597 <li
><a href=
"https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet
">ricochet
</a
></li
>
5601 <p
>Given the network effect it seem obvious to me that we as a society
5602 have been divided and conquered by those interested in keeping
5603 encrypted and secure communication away from the masses. The
5604 finishing remarks
<a href=
"https://vimeo.com/
97505679">from Aral Balkan
5605 in his talk
"Free is a lie
"</a
> about the usability of free software
5606 really come into effect when you want to communicate in private with
5607 your friends and family. We can not expect them to allow the
5608 usability of communication tool to block their ability to talk to
5609 their loved ones.
</p
>
5611 <p
>Note for example the option IRC w/OTR. Most IRC clients do not
5612 have OTR support, so in most cases OTR would not be an option, even if
5613 you wanted to. In my personal experience, about
1 in
20 I talk to
5614 have a IRC client with OTR. For private communication to really be
5615 available, most people to talk to must have the option in their
5616 currently used client. I can not simply ask my family to install an
5617 IRC client. I need to guide them through a technical multi-step
5618 process of adding extensions to the client to get them going. This is
5619 a non-starter for most.
</p
>
5621 <p
>I would like to be able to do video phone calls, audio phone calls,
5622 exchange instant messages and share files with my loved ones, without
5623 being forced to share with people I do not know. I do not want to
5624 share the content of the conversations, and I do not want to share who
5625 I communicate with or the fact that I communicate with someone.
5626 Without all these factors in place, my private life is being more or
5627 less invaded.
</p
>
5629 <p
><strong
>Update
2019-
10-
08</strong
>: Børge Dvergsdal, who told me he
5630 is Customer Relationship Manager @ Whereby (formerly appear.in),
5631 asked if I could mention that appear.in is now renamed and found at
5632 <a href=
"https://whereby.com/
">https://whereby.com/
</a
>. And sure,
5633 why not. Apparently they changed the name because they were unable
5634 to trademark appear.in somewhere... While I am at it, I can mention
5635 that Ring changed name to Jami, now available from
<a
5636 href=
"https://jami.net/
">https://jami.net/
</a
>. Luckily they were
5637 able to have a direct redirect from ring.cx to jami.net, so the user
5638 experience is almost the same.
</p
>
5643 <title>My own self balancing Lego Segway
</title>
5644 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_own_self_balancing_Lego_Segway.html
</link>
5645 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_own_self_balancing_Lego_Segway.html
</guid>
5646 <pubDate>Fri,
4 Nov
2016 10:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
5647 <description><p
>A while back I received a Gyro sensor for the NXT
5648 <a href=
"mindstorms.lego.com
">Mindstorms
</a
> controller as a birthday
5649 present. It had been on my wishlist for a while, because I wanted to
5650 build a Segway like balancing lego robot. I had already built
5651 <a href=
"http://www.nxtprograms.com/NXT2/segway/
">a simple balancing
5652 robot
</a
> with the kids, using the light/color sensor included in the
5653 NXT kit as the balance sensor, but it was not working very well. It
5654 could balance for a while, but was very sensitive to the light
5655 condition in the room and the reflective properties of the surface and
5656 would fall over after a short while. I wanted something more robust,
5658 <a href=
"https://www.hitechnic.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action
&key=NGY1044
">the
5659 gyro sensor from HiTechnic
</a
> I believed would solve it on my
5660 wishlist for some years before it suddenly showed up as a gift from my
5661 loved ones. :)
</p
>
5663 <p
>Unfortunately I have not had time to sit down and play with it
5664 since then. But that changed some days ago, when I was searching for
5665 lego segway information and came across a recipe from HiTechnic for
5667 <a href=
"http://www.hitechnic.com/blog/gyro-sensor/htway/
">the
5668 HTWay
</a
>, a segway like balancing robot. Build instructions and
5669 <a href=
"https://www.hitechnic.com/upload/
786-HTWayC.nxc
">source
5670 code
</a
> was included, so it was just a question of putting it all
5671 together. And thanks to the great work of many Debian developers, the
5672 compiler needed to build the source for the NXT is already included in
5673 Debian, so I was read to go in less than an hour. The resulting robot
5674 do not look very impressive in its simplicity:
</p
>
5676 <p align=
"center
"><img width=
"70%
" src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2016-
11-
04-lego-htway-robot.jpeg
"></p
>
5678 <p
>Because I lack the infrared sensor used to control the robot in the
5679 design from HiTechnic, I had to comment out the last task
5680 (taskControl). I simply placed /* and */ around it get the program
5681 working without that sensor present. Now it balances just fine until
5682 the battery status run low:
</p
>
5684 <p align=
"center
"><video width=
"70%
" controls=
"true
">
5685 <source src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2016-
11-
04-lego-htway-balancing.ogv
" type=
"video/ogg
">
5686 </video
></p
>
5688 <p
>Now we would like to teach it how to follow a line and take remote
5689 control instructions using the included Bluetooth receiver in the NXT.
</p
>
5691 <p
>If you, like me, love LEGO and want to make sure we find the tools
5692 they need to work with LEGO in Debian and all our derivative
5693 distributions like Ubuntu, check out
5694 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners
">the LEGO designers
5695 project page
</a
> and join the Debian LEGO team. Personally I own a
5696 RCX and NXT controller (no EV3), and would like to make sure the
5697 Debian tools needed to program the systems I own work as they
5703 <title>Experience and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile phone
</title>
5704 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html
</link>
5705 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html
</guid>
5706 <pubDate>Mon,
10 Oct
2016 11:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5707 <description><p
>In July
5708 <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
5709 wrote how to get the Signal Chrome/Chromium app working
</a
> without
5710 the ability to receive SMS messages (aka without a cell phone). It is
5711 time to share some experiences and provide an updated setup.
</p
>
5713 <p
>The Signal app have worked fine for several months now, and I use
5714 it regularly to chat with my loved ones. I had a major snag at the
5715 end of my summer vacation, when the the app completely forgot my
5716 setup, identity and keys. The reason behind this major mess was
5717 running out of disk space. To avoid that ever happening again I have
5718 started storing everything in
<tt
>userdata/
</tt
> in git, to be able to
5719 roll back to an earlier version if the files are wiped by mistake. I
5720 had to use it once after introducing the git backup. When rolling
5721 back to an earlier version, one need to use the
'reset session
' option
5722 in Signal to get going, and notify the people you talk with about the
5723 problem. I assume there is some sequence number tracking in the
5724 protocol to detect rollback attacks. The git repository is rather big
5725 (
674 MiB so far), but I have not tried to figure out if some of the
5726 content can be added to a .gitignore file due to lack of spare
5729 <p
>I
've also hit the
90 days timeout blocking, and noticed that this
5730 make it impossible to send messages using Signal. I could still
5731 receive them, but had to patch the code with a new timestamp to send.
5732 I believe the timeout is added by the developers to force people to
5733 upgrade to the latest version of the app, even when there is no
5734 protocol changes, to reduce the version skew among the user base and
5735 thus try to keep the number of support requests down.
</p
>
5737 <p
>Since my original recipe, the Signal source code changed slightly,
5738 making the old patch fail to apply cleanly. Below is an updated
5739 patch, including the shell wrapper I use to start Signal. The
5740 original version required a new user to locate the JavaScript console
5741 and call a function from there. I got help from a friend with more
5742 JavaScript knowledge than me to modify the code to provide a GUI
5743 button instead. This mean that to get started you just need to run
5744 the wrapper and click the
'Register without mobile phone
' to get going
5745 now. I
've also modified the timeout code to always set it to
90 days
5746 in the future, to avoid having to patch the code regularly.
</p
>
5748 <p
>So, the updated recipe for Debian Jessie:
</p
>
5752 <li
>First, install required packages to get the source code and the
5753 browser you need. Signal only work with Chrome/Chromium, as far as I
5754 know, so you need to install it.
5757 apt install git tor chromium
5758 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
5759 </pre
></li
>
5761 <li
>Modify the source code using command listed in the the patch
5762 block below.
</li
>
5764 <li
>Start Signal using the run-signal-app wrapper (for example using
5765 <tt
>`pwd`/run-signal-app
</tt
>).
5767 <li
>Click on the
'Register without mobile phone
', will in a phone
5768 number you can receive calls to the next minute, receive the
5769 verification code and enter it into the form field and press
5770 'Register
'. Note, the phone number you use will be user Signal
5771 username, ie the way others can find you on Signal.
</li
>
5773 <li
>You can now use Signal to contact others. Note, new contacts do
5774 not show up in the contact list until you restart Signal, and there is
5775 no way to assign names to Contacts. There is also no way to create or
5776 update chat groups. I suspect this is because the web app do not have
5777 a associated contact database.
</li
>
5781 <p
>I am still a bit uneasy about using Signal, because of the way its
5782 main author moxie0 reject federation and accept dependencies to major
5783 corporations like Google (part of the code is fetched from Google) and
5784 Amazon (the central coordination point is owned by Amazon). See for
5786 <a href=
"https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/
37">the
5787 LibreSignal issue tracker
</a
> for a thread documenting the authors
5788 view on these issues. But the network effect is strong in this case,
5789 and several of the people I want to communicate with already use
5790 Signal. Perhaps we can all move to
<a href=
"https://ring.cx/
">Ring
</a
>
5791 once it
<a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
830265">work on my
5792 laptop
</a
>? It already work on Windows and Android, and is included
5793 in
<a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring
">Debian
</a
> and
5794 <a href=
"https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ring
">Ubuntu
</a
>, but not
5795 working on Debian Stable.
</p
>
5797 <p
>Anyway, this is the patch I apply to the Signal code to get it
5798 working. It switch to the production servers, disable to timeout,
5799 make registration easier and add the shell wrapper:
</p
>
5802 cd Signal-Desktop; cat
&lt;
&lt;EOF | patch -p1
5803 diff --git a/js/background.js b/js/background.js
5804 index
24b4c1d.
.579345f
100644
5805 --- a/js/background.js
5806 +++ b/js/background.js
5811 - var SERVER_URL =
'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org
';
5812 + var SERVER_URL =
'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org
';
5813 var SERVER_PORTS = [
80,
4433,
8443];
5814 - var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL =
'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com
';
5815 + var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL =
'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com
';
5816 var messageReceiver;
5817 window.getSocketStatus = function() {
5818 if (messageReceiver) {
5819 diff --git a/js/expire.js b/js/expire.js
5820 index
639aeae..beb91c3
100644
5825 'use strict
';
5826 - var BUILD_EXPIRATION =
0;
5827 + var BUILD_EXPIRATION = Date.now() + (
90 *
24 *
60 *
60 *
1000);
5829 window.extension = window.extension || {};
5831 diff --git a/js/views/install_view.js b/js/views/install_view.js
5832 index
7816f4f.
.1d6233b
100644
5833 --- a/js/views/install_view.js
5834 +++ b/js/views/install_view.js
5837 'click .step1
': this.selectStep.bind(this,
1),
5838 'click .step2
': this.selectStep.bind(this,
2),
5839 -
'click .step3
': this.selectStep.bind(this,
3)
5840 +
'click .step3
': this.selectStep.bind(this,
3),
5841 +
'click .callreg
': function() { extension.install(
'standalone
') },
5844 clearQR: function() {
5845 diff --git a/options.html b/options.html
5846 index dc0f28e.
.8d709f6
100644
5850 &lt;div class=
'nav
'>
5851 &lt;h1
>{{ installWelcome }}
&lt;/h1
>
5852 &lt;p
>{{ installTagline }}
&lt;/p
>
5853 -
&lt;div
> &lt;a class=
'button step2
'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}
&lt;/a
> &lt;/div
>
5854 +
&lt;div
> &lt;a class=
'button step2
'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}
&lt;/a
>
5855 +
&lt;br
> &lt;a class=
"button callreg
">Register without mobile phone
&lt;/a
>
5858 &lt;span class=
'dot step1 selected
'>&lt;/span
>
5859 &lt;span class=
'dot step2
'>&lt;/span
>
5860 &lt;span class=
'dot step3
'>&lt;/span
>
5861 --- /dev/null
2016-
10-
07 09:
55:
13.730181472 +
0200
5862 +++ b/run-signal-app
2016-
10-
10 08:
54:
09.434172391 +
0200
5868 +userdata=
"`pwd`/userdata
"
5869 +if [ -d
"$userdata
" ]
&& [ ! -d
"$userdata/.git
" ] ; then
5870 + (cd $userdata
&& git init)
5872 +(cd $userdata
&& git add .
&& git commit -m
"Current status.
" || true)
5874 + --proxy-server=
"socks://localhost:
9050" \
5875 + --user-data-dir=$userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
5877 chmod a+rx run-signal-app
5880 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5881 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5882 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
5887 <title>Isenkram, Appstream and udev make life as a LEGO builder easier
</title>
5888 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram__Appstream_and_udev_make_life_as_a_LEGO_builder_easier.html
</link>
5889 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram__Appstream_and_udev_make_life_as_a_LEGO_builder_easier.html
</guid>
5890 <pubDate>Fri,
7 Oct
2016 09:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5891 <description><p
><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram
">The Isenkram
5892 system
</a
> provide a practical and easy way to figure out which
5893 packages support the hardware in a given machine. The command line
5894 tool
<tt
>isenkram-lookup
</tt
> and the tasksel options provide a
5895 convenient way to list and install packages relevant for the current
5896 hardware during system installation, both user space packages and
5897 firmware packages. The GUI background daemon on the other hand provide
5898 a pop-up proposing to install packages when a new dongle is inserted
5899 while using the computer. For example, if you plug in a smart card
5900 reader, the system will ask if you want to install
<tt
>pcscd
</tt
> if
5901 that package isn
't already installed, and if you plug in a USB video
5902 camera the system will ask if you want to install
<tt
>cheese
</tt
> if
5903 cheese is currently missing. This already work just fine.
</p
>
5905 <p
>But Isenkram depend on a database mapping from hardware IDs to
5906 package names. When I started no such database existed in Debian, so
5907 I made my own data set and included it with the isenkram package and
5908 made isenkram fetch the latest version of this database from git using
5909 http. This way the isenkram users would get updated package proposals
5910 as soon as I learned more about hardware related packages.
</p
>
5912 <p
>The hardware is identified using modalias strings. The modalias
5913 design is from the Linux kernel where most hardware descriptors are
5914 made available as a strings that can be matched using filename style
5915 globbing. It handle USB, PCI, DMI and a lot of other hardware related
5916 identifiers.
</p
>
5918 <p
>The downside to the Isenkram specific database is that there is no
5919 information about relevant distribution / Debian version, making
5920 isenkram propose obsolete packages too. But along came AppStream, a
5921 cross distribution mechanism to store and collect metadata about
5922 software packages. When I heard about the proposal, I contacted the
5923 people involved and suggested to add a hardware matching rule using
5924 modalias strings in the specification, to be able to use AppStream for
5925 mapping hardware to packages. This idea was accepted and AppStream is
5926 now a great way for a package to announce the hardware it support in a
5927 distribution neutral way. I wrote
5928 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html
">a
5929 recipe on how to add such meta-information
</a
> in a blog post last
5930 December. If you have a hardware related package in Debian, please
5931 announce the relevant hardware IDs using AppStream.
</p
>
5933 <p
>In Debian, almost all packages that can talk to a LEGO Mindestorms
5934 RCX or NXT unit, announce this support using AppStream. The effect is
5935 that when you insert such LEGO robot controller into your Debian
5936 machine, Isenkram will propose to install the packages needed to get
5937 it working. The intention is that this should allow the local user to
5938 start programming his robot controller right away without having to
5939 guess what packages to use or which permissions to fix.
</p
>
5941 <p
>But when I sat down with my son the other day to program our NXT
5942 unit using his Debian Stretch computer, I discovered something
5943 annoying. The local console user (ie my son) did not get access to
5944 the USB device for programming the unit. This used to work, but no
5945 longer in Jessie and Stretch. After some investigation and asking
5946 around on #debian-devel, I discovered that this was because udev had
5947 changed the mechanism used to grant access to local devices. The
5948 ConsoleKit mechanism from
<tt
>/lib/udev/rules.d/
70-udev-acl.rules
</tt
>
5949 no longer applied, because LDAP users no longer was added to the
5950 plugdev group during login. Michael Biebl told me that this method
5951 was obsolete and the new method used ACLs instead. This was good
5952 news, as the plugdev mechanism is a mess when using a remote user
5953 directory like LDAP. Using ACLs would make sure a user lost device
5954 access when she logged out, even if the user left behind a background
5955 process which would retain the plugdev membership with the ConsoleKit
5956 setup. Armed with this knowledge I moved on to fix the access problem
5957 for the LEGO Mindstorms related packages.
</p
>
5959 <p
>The new system uses a udev tag,
'uaccess
'. It can either be
5960 applied directly for a device, or is applied in
5961 /lib/udev/rules.d/
70-uaccess.rules for classes of devices. As the
5962 LEGO Mindstorms udev rules did not have a class, I decided to add the
5963 tag directly in the udev rules files included in the packages. Here
5964 is one example. For the nqc C compiler for the RCX, the
5965 <tt
>/lib/udev/rules.d/
60-nqc.rules
</tt
> file now look like this:
5967 <p
><pre
>
5968 SUBSYSTEM==
"usb
", ACTION==
"add
", ATTR{idVendor}==
"0694", ATTR{idProduct}==
"0001", \
5969 SYMLINK+=
"rcx-%k
", TAG+=
"uaccess
"
5970 </pre
></p
>
5972 <p
>The key part is the
'TAG+=
"uaccess
"' at the end. I suspect all
5973 packages using plugdev in their /lib/udev/rules.d/ files should be
5974 changed to use this tag (either directly or indirectly via
5975 <tt
>70-uaccess.rules
</tt
>). Perhaps a lintian check should be created
5976 to detect this?
</p
>
5978 <p
>I
've been unable to find good documentation on the uaccess feature.
5979 It is unclear to me if the uaccess tag is an internal implementation
5980 detail like the udev-acl tag used by
5981 <tt
>/lib/udev/rules.d/
70-udev-acl.rules
</tt
>. If it is, I guess the
5982 indirect method is the preferred way. Michael
5983 <a href=
"https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/
4288">asked for more
5984 documentation from the systemd project
</a
> and I hope it will make
5985 this clearer. For now I use the generic classes when they exist and
5986 is already handled by
<tt
>70-uaccess.rules
</tt
>, and add the tag
5987 directly if no such class exist.
</p
>
5989 <p
>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
5990 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/
">my
5991 blog posts tagged isenkram
</a
>.
</p
>
5993 <p
>To help out making life for LEGO constructors in Debian easier,
5994 please join us on our IRC channel
5995 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-lego
">#debian-lego
</a
> and join
5996 the
<a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-lego/
">Debian
5997 LEGO team
</a
> in the Alioth project we created yesterday. A mailing
5998 list is not yet created, but we are working on it. :)
</p
>
6000 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6001 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6002 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
6007 <title>First draft Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator
's Handbook now public
</title>
6008 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_draft_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_now_public.html
</link>
6009 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_draft_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_now_public.html
</guid>
6010 <pubDate>Tue,
30 Aug
2016 10:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6011 <description><p
>In April we
6012 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html
">started
6013 to work
</a
> on a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the
"open access
" book on
6014 how to set up and administrate a Debian system. Today I am happy to
6015 report that the first draft is now publicly available. You can find
6016 it on
<a href=
"https://debian-handbook.info/get/
">get the Debian
6017 Administrator
's Handbook page
</a
> (under Other languages). The first
6018 eight chapters have a first draft translation, and we are working on
6019 proofreading the content. If you want to help out, please start
6021 <a href=
"https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/
">the
6022 hosted weblate project page
</a
>, and get in touch using
6023 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators
">the
6024 translators mailing list
</a
>. Please also check out
6025 <a href=
"https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/
">the instructions for
6026 contributors
</a
>. A good way to contribute is to proofread the text
6027 and update weblate if you find errors.
</p
>
6029 <p
>Our goal is still to make the Norwegian book available on paper as well as
6030 electronic form.
</p
>
6035 <title>Coz can help you find bottlenecks in multi-threaded software - nice free software
</title>
6036 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html
</link>
6037 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html
</guid>
6038 <pubDate>Thu,
11 Aug
2016 12:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6039 <description><p
>This summer, I read a great article
6040 "<a href=
"https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger
">coz:
6041 This Is the Profiler You
're Looking For
</a
>" in USENIX ;login: about
6042 how to profile multi-threaded programs. It presented a system for
6043 profiling software by running experiences in the running program,
6044 testing how run time performance is affected by
"speeding up
" parts of
6045 the code to various degrees compared to a normal run. It does this by
6046 slowing down parallel threads while the
"faster up
" code is running
6047 and measure how this affect processing time. The processing time is
6048 measured using probes inserted into the code, either using progress
6049 counters (COZ_PROGRESS) or as latency meters (COZ_BEGIN/COZ_END). It
6050 can also measure unmodified code by measuring complete the program
6051 runtime and running the program several times instead.
</p
>
6053 <p
>The project and presentation was so inspiring that I would like to
6054 get the system into Debian. I
6055 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=
830708">created
6056 a WNPP request for it
</a
> and contacted upstream to try to make the
6057 system ready for Debian by sending patches. The build process need to
6058 be changed a bit to avoid running
'git clone
' to get dependencies, and
6059 to include the JavaScript web page used to visualize the collected
6060 profiling information included in the source package.
6061 But I expect that should work out fairly soon.
</p
>
6063 <p
>The way the system work is fairly simple. To run an coz experiment
6064 on a binary with debug symbols available, start the program like this:
6066 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
6067 coz run --- program-to-run
6068 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
6070 <p
>This will create a text file profile.coz with the instrumentation
6071 information. To show what part of the code affect the performance
6072 most, use a web browser and either point it to
6073 <a href=
"http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/
">http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/
</a
>
6074 or use the copy from git (in the gh-pages branch). Check out this web
6075 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
6076 profiling more useful you include
&lt;coz.h
&gt; and insert the
6077 COZ_PROGRESS or COZ_BEGIN and COZ_END at appropriate places in the
6078 code, rebuild and run the profiler. This allow coz to do more
6079 targeted experiments.
</p
>
6081 <p
>A video published by ACM
6082 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE0V-p1odPg
">presenting the
6083 Coz profiler
</a
> is available from Youtube. There is also a paper
6084 from the
25th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles available
6086 <a href=
"https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/curtsinger
">Coz:
6087 finding code that counts with causal profiling
</a
>.
</p
>
6089 <p
><a href=
"https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz
">The source code
</a
>
6090 for Coz is available from github. It will only build with clang
6092 <a href=
"https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=
55606">C++
6093 feature missing in GCC
</a
>, but I
've submitted
6094 <a href=
"https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz/pull/
67">a patch to solve
6095 it
</a
> and hope it will be included in the upstream source soon.
</p
>
6097 <p
>Please get in touch if you, like me, would like to see this piece
6098 of software in Debian. I would very much like some help with the
6099 packaging effort, as I lack the in depth knowledge on how to package
6100 C++ libraries.
</p
>
6105 <title>Sales number for the Free Culture translation, first half of
2016</title>
6106 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sales_number_for_the_Free_Culture_translation__first_half_of_2016.html
</link>
6107 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sales_number_for_the_Free_Culture_translation__first_half_of_2016.html
</guid>
6108 <pubDate>Fri,
5 Aug
2016 22:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6109 <description><p
>As my regular readers probably remember, the last year I published
6110 a French and Norwegian translation of the classic
6111 <a href=
"http://www.free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture book
</a
> by the
6112 founder of the Creative Commons movement, Lawrence Lessig. A bit less
6113 known is the fact that due to the way I created the translations,
6114 using docbook and po4a, I also recreated the English original. And
6115 because I already had created a new the PDF edition, I published it
6116 too. The revenue from the books are sent to the Creative Commons
6117 Corporation. In other words, I do not earn any money from this
6118 project, I just earn the warm fuzzy feeling that the text is available
6119 for a wider audience and more people can learn why the Creative
6120 Commons is needed.
</p
>
6122 <p
>Today, just for fun, I had a look at the sales number over at
6123 Lulu.com, which take care of payment, printing and shipping. Much to
6124 my surprise, the English edition is selling better than both the
6125 French and Norwegian edition, despite the fact that it has been
6126 available in English since it was first published. In total,
24 paper
6127 books was sold for USD $
19.99 between
2016-
01-
01 and
2016-
07-
31:
</p
>
6129 <table border=
"0">
6130 <tr
><th
>Title / language
</th
><th
>Quantity
</th
></tr
>
6131 <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
>
6132 <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
>
6133 <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
>
6136 <p
>The books are available both from Lulu.com and from large book
6137 stores like Amazon and Barnes
&Noble. Most revenue, around $
10 per
6138 book, is sent to the Creative Commons project when the book is sold
6139 directly by Lulu.com. The other channels give less revenue. The
6140 summary from Lulu tell me
10 books was sold via the Amazon channel,
10
6141 via Ingram (what is this?) and
4 directly by Lulu. And Lulu.com tells
6142 me that the revenue sent so far this year is USD $
101.42. No idea
6143 what kind of sales numbers to expect, so I do not know if that is a
6144 good amount of sales for a
10 year old book or not. But it make me
6145 happy that the buyers find the book, and I hope they enjoy reading it
6146 as much as I did.
</p
>
6148 <p
>The ebook edition is available for free from
6149 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">Github
</a
>.
</p
>
6151 <p
>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
6152 language, I would be happy to help make it happen. Please get in
6158 <title>Techno TV broadcasting live across Norway and the Internet (#debconf16, #nuug) on @frikanalen
</title>
6159 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Techno_TV_broadcasting_live_across_Norway_and_the_Internet___debconf16___nuug__on__frikanalen.html
</link>
6160 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Techno_TV_broadcasting_live_across_Norway_and_the_Internet___debconf16___nuug__on__frikanalen.html
</guid>
6161 <pubDate>Mon,
1 Aug
2016 10:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6162 <description><p
>Did you know there is a TV channel broadcasting talks from DebConf
6163 16 across an entire country? Or that there is a TV channel
6164 broadcasting talks by or about
6165 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/
625529/
">Linus Torvalds
</a
>,
6166 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/
625599/
">Tor
</a
>,
6167 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/
624019/
">OpenID
</A
>,
6168 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/
625624/
">Common Lisp
</a
>,
6169 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/
625446/
">Civic Tech
</a
>,
6170 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/
625090/
">EFF founder John Barlow
</a
>,
6171 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/
625432/
">how to make
3D
6172 printer electronics
</a
> and many more fascinating topics? It works
6173 using only free software (all of it
6174 <a href=
"http://github.com/Frikanalen
">available from Github
</a
>), and
6175 is administrated using a web browser and a web API.
</p
>
6177 <p
>The TV channel is the Norwegian open channel
6178 <a href=
"http://www.frikanalen.no/
">Frikanalen
</a
>, and I am involved
6179 via
<a href=
"https://www.nuug.no/
">the NUUG member association
</a
> in
6180 running and developing the software for the channel. The channel is
6181 organised as a member organisation where its members can upload and
6182 broadcast what they want (think of it as Youtube for national
6183 broadcasting television). Individuals can broadcast too. The time
6184 slots are handled on a first come, first serve basis. Because the
6185 channel have almost no viewers and very few active members, we can
6186 experiment with TV technology without too much flack when we make
6187 mistakes. And thanks to the few active members, most of the slots on
6188 the schedule are free. I see this as an opportunity to spread
6189 knowledge about technology and free software, and have a script I run
6190 regularly to fill up all the open slots the next few days with
6191 technology related video. The end result is a channel I like to
6192 describe as Techno TV - filled with interesting talks and
6193 presentations.
</p
>
6195 <p
>It is available on channel
50 on the Norwegian national digital TV
6196 network (RiksTV). It is also available as a multicast stream on
6197 Uninett. And finally, it is available as
6198 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/
">a WebM unicast stream
</a
> from
6199 Frikanalen and NUUG. Check it out. :)
</p
>
6204 <title>Unlocking HTC Desire HD on Linux using unruu and fastboot
</title>
6205 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlocking_HTC_Desire_HD_on_Linux_using_unruu_and_fastboot.html
</link>
6206 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlocking_HTC_Desire_HD_on_Linux_using_unruu_and_fastboot.html
</guid>
6207 <pubDate>Thu,
7 Jul
2016 11:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6208 <description><p
>Yesterday, I tried to unlock a HTC Desire HD phone, and it proved
6209 to be a slight challenge. Here is the recipe if I ever need to do it
6210 again. It all started by me wanting to try the recipe to set up
6211 <a href=
"https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy
">an
6212 hardened Android installation
</a
> from the Tor project blog on a
6213 device I had access to. It is a old mobile phone with a broken
6214 microphone The initial idea had been to just
6215 <a href=
"http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_ace
">install
6216 CyanogenMod on it
</a
>, but did not quite find time to start on it
6217 until a few days ago.
</p
>
6219 <p
>The unlock process is supposed to be simple: (
1) Boot into the boot
6220 loader (press volume down and power at the same time), (
2) select
6221 'fastboot
' before (
3) connecting the device via USB to a Linux
6222 machine, (
4) request the device identifier token by running
'fastboot
6223 oem get_identifier_token
', (
5) request the device unlocking key using
6224 the
<a href=
"http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader/
">HTC developer web
6225 site
</a
> and unlock the phone using the key file emailed to you.
</p
>
6227 <p
>Unfortunately, this only work fi you have hboot version
2.00.0029
6228 or newer, and the device I was working on had
2.00.0027. This
6229 apparently can be easily fixed by downloading a Windows program and
6230 running it on your Windows machine, if you accept the terms Microsoft
6231 require you to accept to use Windows - which I do not. So I had to
6232 come up with a different approach. I got a lot of help from AndyCap
6233 on #nuug, and would not have been able to get this working without
6236 <p
>First I needed to extract the hboot firmware from
6237 <a href=
"http://www.htcdev.com/ruu/PD9810000_Ace_Sense30_S_hboot_2.00
.0029.exe
">the
6238 windows binary for HTC Desire HD
</a
> downloaded as
'the RUU
' from HTC.
6239 For this there is is
<a href=
"https://github.com/kmdm/unruu/
">a github
6240 project named unruu
</a
> using libunshield. The unshield tool did not
6241 recognise the file format, but unruu worked and extracted rom.zip,
6242 containing the new hboot firmware and a text file describing which
6243 devices it would work for.
</p
>
6245 <p
>Next, I needed to get the new firmware into the device. For this I
6246 followed some instructions
6247 <a href=
"http://www.htc1guru.com/
2013/
09/new-ruu-zips-posted/
">available
6248 from HTC1Guru.com
</a
>, and ran these commands as root on a Linux
6249 machine with Debian testing:
</p
>
6251 <p
><pre
>
6252 adb reboot-bootloader
6253 fastboot oem rebootRUU
6254 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
6255 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
6257 </pre
></p
>
6259 <p
>The flash command apparently need to be done twice to take effect,
6260 as the first is just preparations and the second one do the flashing.
6261 The adb command is just to get to the boot loader menu, so turning the
6262 device on while holding volume down and the power button should work
6265 <p
>With the new hboot version in place I could start following the
6266 instructions on the HTC developer web site. I got the device token
6267 like this:
</p
>
6269 <p
><pre
>
6270 fastboot oem get_identifier_token
2>&1 | sed
's/(bootloader) //
'
6273 <p
>And once I got the unlock code via email, I could use it like
6276 <p
><pre
>
6277 fastboot flash unlocktoken Unlock_code.bin
6278 </pre
></p
>
6280 <p
>And with that final step in place, the phone was unlocked and I
6281 could start stuffing the software of my own choosing into the device.
6282 So far I only inserted a replacement recovery image to wipe the phone
6283 before I start. We will see what happen next. Perhaps I should
6284 install
<a href=
"https://www.debian.org/
">Debian
</a
> on it. :)
</p
>
6289 <title>How to use the Signal app if you only have a land line (ie no mobile phone)
</title>
6290 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html
</link>
6291 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html
</guid>
6292 <pubDate>Sun,
3 Jul
2016 14:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6293 <description><p
>For a while now, I have wanted to test
6294 <a href=
"https://whispersystems.org/
">the Signal app
</a
>, as it is
6295 said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my
6296 friends and family are already using it. As I by choice do not own a
6297 mobile phone, this proved to be harder than expected. And I wanted to
6298 have the source of the client and know that it was the code used on my
6299 machine. But yesterday I managed to get it working. I used the
6300 Github source, compared it to the source in
6301 <a href=
"https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/signal-private-messenger/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk?hl=en-US
">the
6302 Signal Chrome app
</a
> available from the Chrome web store, applied
6303 patches to use the production Signal servers, started the app and
6304 asked for the hidden
"register without a smart phone
" form. Here is
6305 the recipe how I did it.
</p
>
6307 <p
>First, I fetched the Signal desktop source from Github, using
6310 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
6313 <p
>Next, I patched the source to use the production servers, to be
6314 able to talk to other Signal users:
</p
>
6317 cat
&lt;
&lt;EOF | patch -p0
6318 diff -ur ./js/background.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/
0.15.0_0/js/background.js
6319 --- ./js/background.js
2016-
06-
29 13:
43:
15.630344628 +
0200
6320 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/
0.15.0_0/js/background.js
2016-
06-
29 14:
06:
29.530300934 +
0200
6325 - var SERVER_URL =
'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org
';
6326 - var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL =
'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com
';
6327 + var SERVER_URL =
'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org:
4433';
6328 + var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL =
'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com
';
6329 var messageReceiver;
6330 window.getSocketStatus = function() {
6331 if (messageReceiver) {
6332 diff -ur ./js/expire.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/
0.15.0_0/js/expire.js
6333 --- ./js/expire.js
2016-
06-
29 13:
43:
15.630344628 +
0200
6334 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/
0.15.0_0/js/expire.js2016-
06-
29 14:
06:
29.530300934 +
0200
6337 'use strict
';
6338 - var BUILD_EXPIRATION =
0;
6339 + var BUILD_EXPIRATION =
1474492690000;
6341 window.extension = window.extension || {};
6346 <p
>The first part is changing the servers, and the second is updating
6347 an expiration timestamp. This timestamp need to be updated regularly.
6348 It is set
90 days in the future by the build process (Gruntfile.js).
6349 The value is seconds since
1970 times
1000, as far as I can tell.
</p
>
6351 <p
>Based on a tip and good help from the #nuug IRC channel, I wrote a
6352 script to launch Signal in Chromium.
</p
>
6359 --proxy-server=
"socks://localhost:
9050" \
6360 --user-data-dir=`pwd`/userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
6363 <p
> The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor
6364 SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today
6365 Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines
6366 will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal
6367 connections if they use source IP address.
</p
>
6369 <p
>When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under
6370 "Standalone Registration
" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git
6371 repository. I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the
6372 Chromium debugging tool, visited the
'Console
' tab and wrote
6373 'extension.install(
"standalone
")
' on the console prompt to get the
6374 registration form. Then I entered by land line phone number and
6375 pressed
'Call
'.
5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice
6376 repeated the verification code three times. After entering the number
6377 into the verification code field in the form, I could start using
6378 Signal from my laptop.
6380 <p
>As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to
6381 whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server,
6382 but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server
6383 setup. It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the
6384 content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data
6385 exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know.
6386 So better than many options, but not great. And sadly the usage is
6387 connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server
6388 to associate it to my home and person. I would prefer it if only
6389 those I knew could tell who I was on Signal. There are options
6390 avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not
6391 using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.
</p
>
6393 <p
><strong
>Update
2017-
01-
10</strong
>: There is an updated blog post
6395 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html
">Experience
6396 and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile
6397 phone
</a
>.
</p
>
6402 <title>The new
"best
" multimedia player in Debian?
</title>
6403 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html
</link>
6404 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html
</guid>
6405 <pubDate>Mon,
6 Jun
2016 12:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6406 <description><p
>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
6407 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html
">which
6408 multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
6409 MIME types
</a
>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
6410 the various players claimed support for. The range was from
55 to
130
6411 MIME types. I suspect most media formats are supported by all
6412 players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
6413 their desktop files. There are probably also some bogus MIME types
6414 listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.
</p
>
6416 <p
>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
6417 the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
6418 and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
6419 favorite media player VLC. The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
6420 yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
6421 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport
">Multimedia
6422 player MIME type support status
</a
> Debian wiki page.
</p
>
6424 <p
>The new
"best
" multimedia player in Debian? It is VLC, followed by
6425 totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
6426 kmplayer. I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
6427 several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
6428 toten and parole.
</p
>
6430 <p
>A sad observation is that only
14 MIME types are listed as
6431 supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
6432 desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
6433 audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
6434 video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
6435 video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo. Personally I find
6436 it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
6437 players in Debian. As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
6443 <title>A program should be able to open its own files on Linux
</title>
6444 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html
</link>
6445 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html
</guid>
6446 <pubDate>Sun,
5 Jun
2016 08:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6447 <description><p
>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
6448 decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
6449 talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine. I
6450 wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
6451 the day before I would give the talk. The next day I took a plane to
6452 the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
6453 started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
6454 that kpresenter refused to load its own data file. I cursed a bit and
6455 started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
6456 present when I arrived. I tested that the saved files could be
6457 loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued. I continued to polish the
6458 slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
6459 be loaded into kpresenter. In the end I had to rewrite the slides
6460 three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
6461 shorter. After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem
&ndash;
6462 kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
6463 Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
6464 program to make slides. The point I
'm trying to make is that we
6465 expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
6466 embarrassing to its developers if it can
't.
</p
>
6468 <p
>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
6469 files from the desktop file browser? It is not a uncommon problem. A
6470 while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
6471 gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
6472 browser would refuse to open. No video player claimed to understand
6473 such file. I tracked down the cause being
<tt
>file --mime-type
</tt
>
6474 returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
6475 installed listed as a MIME type they would understand. I asked for
6476 <a href=
"http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=
382">file to change its
6477 behavour
</a
> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead. I also asked
6478 several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
6479 the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files. After a
6480 while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
6481 output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.
</p
>
6483 <p
>But history repeats itself. A few days ago I tested the music
6484 system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
6485 browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
6486 (*.rg). I
've reported
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
825993">the
6487 rosegarden problem to BTS
</a
> and a fix is commited to git and will be
6488 included in the next upload. To increase the chance of me remembering
6489 how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
6490 from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.
</p
>
6492 <p
>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
6493 There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file. The output from
6494 <tt
>file --mime-type
</tt
> mentioned above, and the content of the
6495 shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/). The file MIME
6496 type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
6497 information is collected from
6498 <a href=
"https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/
">the
6499 desktop files
</a
> available in /usr/share/applications/. If there is
6500 one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
6501 activated when asking to open a given file. If there are more, one
6502 can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
6503 selecting the wanted one using
'Open with
' or similar. In general
6504 this work well. But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
6506 <a href=
"http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml
">a
6507 MIME type registered with IANA
</a
>), file and/or the shared MIME
6508 registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
6509 type in its list of supported MIME types.
</p
>
6511 <p
>The
<tt
>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml
</tt
> entry for
6512 <a href=
"http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec
">the
6513 Shared MIME database
</a
> look like this:
</p
>
6515 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
6516 &lt;?xml version=
"1.0" encoding=
"UTF-
8"?
&gt;
6517 &lt;mime-info xmlns=
"http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info
"&gt;
6518 &lt;mime-type type=
"audio/x-rosegarden
"&gt;
6519 &lt;sub-class-of type=
"application/x-gzip
"/
&gt;
6520 &lt;comment
&gt;Rosegarden project file
&lt;/comment
&gt;
6521 &lt;glob pattern=
"*.rg
"/
&gt;
6522 &lt;/mime-type
&gt;
6523 &lt;/mime-info
&gt;
6524 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
6526 <p
>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
6527 (it is a gzipped XML file). Note, it is much better to use an
6528 official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
6529 unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.
</p
>
6531 <p
>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
6532 audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
6533 file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:
</p
>
6535 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
6536 % grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
6537 MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
6538 X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
6540 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
6542 <p
>The fix was to add
"audio/x-rosegarden;
" at the end of the
6543 MimeType= line.
</p
>
6545 <p
>If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when
6546 selected from the file browser, please check out the output from
6547 <tt
>file --mime-type
</tt
> for the file, ensure the file ending and
6548 MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check
6549 that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming
6550 support for this MIME type. If not, please report a bug to have it
6556 <title>Tor - from its creators mouth
11 years ago
</title>
6557 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Tor___from_its_creators_mouth_11_years_ago.html
</link>
6558 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Tor___from_its_creators_mouth_11_years_ago.html
</guid>
6559 <pubDate>Sat,
28 May
2016 14:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6560 <description><p
>A little more than
11 years ago, one of the creators of Tor, and
6561 the current President of
<a href=
"https://www.torproject.org/
">the Tor
6562 project
</a
>, Roger Dingledine, gave a talk for the members of the
6563 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">Norwegian Unix User group
</a
> (NUUG). A
6564 video of the talk was recorded, and today, thanks to the great help
6565 from David Noble, I finally was able to publish the video of the talk
6566 on Frikanalen, the Norwegian open channel TV station where NUUG
6567 currently publishes its talks. You can
6568 <a href=
"http://frikanalen.no/se
">watch the live stream using a web
6569 browser
</a
> with WebM support, or check out the recording on the video
6570 on demand page for the talk
6571 "<a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/
625599">Tor: Anonymous
6572 communication for the US Department of Defence...and you.
</a
>".
</p
>
6574 <p
>Here is the video included for those of you using browsers with
6575 HTML video and Ogg Theora support:
</p
>
6577 <p
><video width=
"70%
" poster=
"http://simula.gunkies.org/media/
625599/large_thumb/
20050421-tor-frikanalen.jpg
" controls
>
6578 <source src=
"http://simula.gunkies.org/media/
625599/theora/
20050421-tor-frikanalen.ogv
" type=
"video/ogg
"/
>
6579 </video
></p
>
6581 <p
>I guess the gist of the talk can be summarised quite simply: If you
6582 want to help the military in USA (and everyone else), use Tor. :)
</p
>
6587 <title>Isenkram with PackageKit support - new version
0.23 available in Debian unstable
</title>
6588 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_with_PackageKit_support___new_version_0_23_available_in_Debian_unstable.html
</link>
6589 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_with_PackageKit_support___new_version_0_23_available_in_Debian_unstable.html
</guid>
6590 <pubDate>Wed,
25 May
2016 10:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6591 <description><p
><a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram
">The isenkram
6592 system
</a
> is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware
6593 related packages. The idea is to have a database of mappings between
6594 hardware and packages, and pop up a dialog suggesting for the user to
6595 install the packages to use a given hardware dongle. Some use cases
6596 are when you insert a Yubikey, it proposes to install the software
6597 needed to control it; when you insert a braille reader list it
6598 proposes to install the packages needed to send text to the reader;
6599 and when you insert a ColorHug screen calibrator it suggests to
6600 install the driver for it. The system work well, and even have a few
6601 command line tools to install firmware packages and packages for the
6602 hardware already in the machine (as opposed to hotpluggable hardware).
</p
>
6604 <p
>The system was initially written using aptdaemon, because I found
6605 good documentation and example code on how to use it. But aptdaemon
6606 is going away and is generally being replaced by
6607 <a href=
"http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/
">PackageKit
</a
>,
6608 so Isenkram needed a rewrite. And today, thanks to the great patch
6609 from my college Sunil Mohan Adapa in the FreedomBox project, the
6610 rewrite finally took place. I
've just uploaded a new version of
6611 Isenkram into Debian Unstable with the patch included, and the default
6612 for the background daemon is now to use PackageKit. To check it out,
6613 install the
<tt
>isenkram
</tt
> package and insert some hardware dongle
6614 and see if it is recognised.
</p
>
6616 <p
>If you want to know what kind of packages isenkram would propose for
6617 the machine it is running on, you can check out the isenkram-lookup
6618 program. This is what it look like on a Thinkpad X230:
</p
>
6620 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
6636 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
6638 <p
>The hardware mappings come from several places. The preferred way
6639 is for packages to announce their hardware support using
6640 <a href=
"https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/
">the
6641 cross distribution appstream system
</a
>.
6643 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/
">previous
6644 blog posts about isenkram
</a
> to learn how to do that.
</p
>
6649 <title>Discharge rate estimate in new battery statistics collector for Debian
</title>
6650 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Discharge_rate_estimate_in_new_battery_statistics_collector_for_Debian.html
</link>
6651 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Discharge_rate_estimate_in_new_battery_statistics_collector_for_Debian.html
</guid>
6652 <pubDate>Mon,
23 May
2016 09:
35:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6653 <description><p
>Yesterday I updated the
6654 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats
">battery-stats
6655 package in Debian
</a
> with a few patches sent to me by skilled and
6656 enterprising users. There were some nice user and visible changes.
6657 First of all, both desktop menu entries now work. A design flaw in
6658 one of the script made the history graph fail to show up (its PNG was
6659 dumped in ~/.xsession-errors) if no controlling TTY was available.
6660 The script worked when called from the command line, but not when
6661 called from the desktop menu. I changed this to look for a DISPLAY
6662 variable or a TTY before deciding where to draw the graph, and now the
6663 graph window pop up as expected.
</p
>
6665 <p
>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
6666 graphs (the one showing the last few hours). New is also the user of
6667 colours showing charging in blue and discharge in red. The percentages
6668 of this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
6671 <p align=
"center
"><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2016-
05-
23-battery-stats-rate.png
"/
></p
>
6673 <p
>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
6674 statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to
6675 visualise how the battery life time get shorter over time. The red
6676 line in this graph is what the previous graph considers
100 percent:
6678 <p align=
"center
"><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2016-
05-
23-battery-stats-history.png
"/
></p
>
6680 <p
>In this graph you can see that I only charge the battery to
80
6681 percent of last full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is
6682 shrinking. :(
</p
>
6684 <p
>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle
6685 more hardware models. On some hardware, Linux power supply
6686 information is stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the
6687 collector previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/. Now
6688 both are checked to figure if there is power connected to the
6691 <p
>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
6693 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats
">battery-stats
</a
>
6694 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
6695 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
<a
6696 href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats
">github
</a
>.
6697 Patches are very welcome.
</p
>
6699 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6700 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6701 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
6706 <title>French edition of Lawrence Lessigs book Cultura Libre on Amazon and Barnes
& Noble
</title>
6707 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_edition_of_Lawrence_Lessigs_book_Cultura_Libre_on_Amazon_and_Barnes___Noble.html
</link>
6708 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_edition_of_Lawrence_Lessigs_book_Cultura_Libre_on_Amazon_and_Barnes___Noble.html
</guid>
6709 <pubDate>Sat,
21 May
2016 10:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6710 <description><p
>A few weeks ago the French paperback edition of Lawrence Lessigs
6711 2004 book Cultura Libre was published. Today I noticed that the book
6712 is now available from book stores. You can now buy it from
6713 <a href=
"http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Libre-French-Lawrence-Lessig/dp/
8269018260">Amazon
</a
>
6715 <a href=
"http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/culture-libre-lawrence-lessig/
1123776705">Barnes
6716 & Noble
</a
> ($?) and as always from
6717 <a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-
22645082.html
">Lulu.com
</a
>
6718 ($
19.99). The revenue is donated to the Creative Commons project. If
6719 you buy from Lulu.com, they currently get $
10.59, while if you buy
6720 from one of the book stores most of the revenue go to the book store
6721 and the Creative Commons project get much (not sure how much
6724 <p
>I was a bit surprised to discover that there is a kindle edition
6725 sold by Amazon Digital Services LLC on Amazon. Not quite sure how
6726 that edition was created, but if you want to download a electronic
6727 edition (PDF, EPUB, Mobi) generated from the same files used to create
6728 the paperback edition, they are
6729 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">available
6730 from github
</a
>.
</p
>
6735 <title>I want the courts to be involved before the police can hijack a news site DNS domain (#domstolkontroll)
</title>
6736 <link>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
</link>
6737 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">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
</guid>
6738 <pubDate>Thu,
19 May
2016 14:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6739 <description><p
>I just donated to the
6740 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml
">NUUG defence
6741 "fond
"</a
> to fund the effort in Norway to get the seizure of the news
6742 site popcorn-time.no tested in court. I hope everyone that agree with
6743 me will do the same.
</p
>
6745 <p
>Would you be worried if you knew the police in your country could
6746 hijack DNS domains of news sites covering free software system without
6747 talking to a judge first? I am. What if the free software system
6748 combined search engine lookups, bittorrent downloads and video playout
6749 and was called Popcorn Time? Would that affect your view? It still
6750 make me worried.
</p
>
6752 <p
>In March
2016, the Norwegian police seized (as in forced NORID to
6753 change the IP address pointed to by it to one controlled by the
6754 police) the DNS domain popcorn-time.no, without any supervision from
6755 the courts. I did not know about the web site back then, and assumed
6756 the courts had been involved, and was very surprised when I discovered
6757 that the police had hijacked the DNS domain without asking a judge for
6758 permission first. I was even more surprised when I had a look at
6759 <a href=
"https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://popcorn-time.no
">the web
6760 site content on the Internet Archive
</A
>, and only found news coverage
6761 about Popcorn Time, not any material published without the right
6762 holders permissions.
</p
>
6764 <p
>The seizure was widely covered in the Norwegian press (see for
6765 example
<a href=
"http://www.hegnar.no/Nyheter/Naeringsliv/
2016/
03/Popcorn-time.no-beslaglagt-av-OEkokrim
">Hegnar Online
</a
> and
6766 <a href=
"http://itavisen.no/
2016/
03/
08/okokrim-har-beslaglagt-popcorn-time-no/
">ITavisen
<a/
>
6768 <a href=
"http://www.nrk.no/kultur/okokrim-gar-til-aksjon-mot-popcorn-time-
1.12842452">NRK
</a
>),
6769 at first due to the press release sent out by Økokrim, but then based
6771 <a href=
"http://blogg.torvund.net/
2016/
03/
09/okokrims-beslag-i-domenet-popcorn-time-no/
">protests
6772 from the law professor Olav Torvund
</a
> and
6773 <a href=
"http://www.klassekampen.no/article/
20160311/ARTICLE/
160319995">lawyer
6774 Jon Wessel-Aas
</a
>. It even got some
6775 <a href=
"https://torrentfreak.com/norwegian-authorities-sued-over-popcorn-time-domain-seizure-
160418/
">coverage
6776 on TorrentFreak
</a
>.
</p
>
6779 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html
">
6780 wrote about the case a month ago
</a
>, when the
6781 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">Norwegian Unix User Group
</a
> (NUUG),
6782 where I am an active member, decided to ask the courts to test this seizure.
6783 The request was denied, but NUUG and its co-requestor EFN have not
6784 given up, and now they are rallying for support to get the seizure
6785 legally challenged. They accept both bank and Bitcoin transfer for
6786 those that want to support the request.
</p
>
6788 <p
>If you as me believe news sites about free software should not be
6789 censored, even if the free software have both legal and illegal
6790 applications, and that DNS hijacking should be tested by the courts, I
6791 suggest you
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml
">show
6792 your support by donating to NUUG
</a
>.
</a
>
6797 <title>Debian now with ZFS on Linux included
</title>
6798 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html
</link>
6799 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html
</guid>
6800 <pubDate>Thu,
12 May
2016 07:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6801 <description><p
>Today, after many years of hard work from many people,
6802 <a href=
"http://zfsonlinux.org/
">ZFS for Linux
</a
> finally entered
6803 Debian. The package status can be seen on
6804 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zfs-linux
">the package tracker
6805 for zfs-linux
</a
>. and
6806 <a href=
"https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org
">the
6807 team status page
</a
>. If you want to help out, please join us.
6808 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git
">The
6809 source code
</a
> is available via git on Alioth. It would also be
6810 great if you could help out with
6811 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dkms
">the dkms package
</a
>, as
6812 it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.
</p
>
6817 <title>What is the best multimedia player in Debian?
</title>
6818 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html
</link>
6819 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html
</guid>
6820 <pubDate>Sun,
8 May
2016 09:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6821 <description><p
><strong
>Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in
6822 Debian claim support for most file formats.
</strong
></p
>
6824 <p
>A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser
6825 plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian
6826 Edu. I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types
6827 for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser
6828 plugin supported most file formats / media types.
6829 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia
">The
6830 result
</a
> can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have
6831 not been updated for a while. But browser plugins are less relevant
6832 these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone
6835 <p
>A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable
6836 player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National
6837 Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why. The cause is a
6838 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
822245">missing MIME type in the VLC
6839 desktop file
</a
>. In the process I wrote a script to compare the set
6840 of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin,
6841 only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the
6842 two for VLC. This discovery made me dig up the script I used to
6843 compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files
6844 instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian
6845 support most file formats.
</p
>
6847 <p
>The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as
6848 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport
">a
6849 table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included
6850 in the table
</a
>, with the package supporting most MIME types being
6851 listed first in the table.
</p
>
6853 </p
>The best multimedia player in Debian? It is totem, followed by
6854 parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and
6855 kmplayer. Time for the other players to update their announced MIME
6861 <title>The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled
</title>
6862 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html
</link>
6863 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html
</guid>
6864 <pubDate>Wed,
4 May
2016 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6865 <description>A friend of mine made me aware of
6866 <a href=
"https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/
">The Pyra
</a
>, a
6867 handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled. I
6868 would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)
</p
>
6870 <p
>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
6871 plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a
5"
6872 LCD touch screen. The
6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
6873 day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
6874 confirming this. The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
6875 last I heard last night was that
22 more orders were needed before
6876 production started.
</p
>
6878 <p
>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
6879 Debian. Please let me know if you know of any others. Is it the
6880 first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?
</p
>
6885 <title>NUUG contests Norwegian police DNS seizure of popcorn-time.no
</title>
6886 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html
</link>
6887 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html
</guid>
6888 <pubDate>Mon,
18 Apr
2016 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6889 <description><p
>It is days like today I am really happy to be a member of
6890 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">the Norwegian Unix User group
</a
>, a
6891 member association for those of us believing in free software, open
6892 standards and unix-like operating systems. NUUG announced today it
6894 <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
6895 to bring the seizure of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no as
6896 unlawful
</a
>, to stand up for the principle that writing about a
6897 controversial topic is not infringing copyrights, and censuring web
6898 pages by hijacking DNS domain should be decided by the courts, not the
6899 police. The DNS domain was seized by the Norwegian National Authority
6900 for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime
6901 a month ago. I hope this bring more paying members to NUUG to give
6902 the association the financial muscle needed to bring this case as far
6903 as it must go to stop this kind of DNS hijacking.
</p
>
6908 <title>I.F. Stone - an inspiration for us all
</title>
6909 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_F__Stone___an_inspiration_for_us_all.html
</link>
6910 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_F__Stone___an_inspiration_for_us_all.html
</guid>
6911 <pubDate>Wed,
13 Apr
2016 21:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6912 <description><p
>I first got to know I.F. Stone when I came across an article by Jon
6913 Schwarz on The Intercept
6914 <a href=
"https://theintercept.com/
2015/
05/
07/new-documentary-legacy-f-stone/
">about
6915 his extraordinary contribution to investigative journalism in
6916 USA
</a
>. The article is about a new documentary in two parts
6917 (
<a href=
"https://vimeo.com/
123974841">part one is
12 minutes
</a
> and
6918 <a href=
"https://vimeo.com/
123974842">part two is
30 minutes
</a
>), and
6919 I found both truly fascinating. It is amazing what he was able to
6920 find by digging up public sources and government papers. He
6921 documented lots of government abuse and cover ups, and I find
6922 <a href=
"http://www.ifstone.org/weekly.php
">his weekly news letters
</a
>
6923 inspiring to read even today.
</p
>
6925 <p
><blockquote
>
6926 All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.
6927 <br
>- I. F. Stone
6928 </blockquote
></p
>
6930 <p
>His starting point was that reporters should not assume governments
6931 and corporations are telling the truth, but verify all their claims as
6932 much as possible. I wonder how many Norwegian reporters can be said
6933 to follow the principles of I. F. Stone. They are definitely in short
6934 supply. If you, like me half a year ago, have never heard of him,
6935 check him out.
</p
>
6940 <title>A French paperback edition of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig is now available
</title>
6941 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_French_paperback_edition_of_the_book_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig_is_now_available.html
</link>
6942 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_French_paperback_edition_of_the_book_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig_is_now_available.html
</guid>
6943 <pubDate>Tue,
12 Apr
2016 10:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6944 <description><p
>I
'm happy to report that
6945 <a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-
22645082.html
">the
6946 French paperback edition
</a
> of
6947 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">my
6948 project to translate
</a
> the
<a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free
6949 Culture
</a
> book by Lawrence Lessig is now available for sale on
6950 Lulu.com. Once I have formally verified my proof reading copy, which
6951 should be in the mail, the paperback edition should be available in
6952 book stores like Amazon and Barnes
& Noble too.
</p
>
6954 <p
>This French edition, Culture Libre, is the work of the
6955 <a href=
"http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/
">dblatex
</a
> developer Benoît
6956 Guillon, who created the PO file from the initial translation
6958 <a href=
"http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre
">the Wikilivres
6959 wiki pages
</a
> and completed and corrected the translation to match
6960 the original docbook edition my project is using, as well as
6961 coordinated the proof reading of the final result. I believe the end
6962 result look great, but I am biased and do not read French. In
6963 addition to the paperback edition, the book is available in PDF, EPUB
6964 and Mobi format from the github project page linked to above.
</p
>
6966 <p
>When enabling book store distribution on Lulu.com, I had to nearly
6967 triple the price to allow the book stores some profit. I also had to
6968 accept that I will get some revenue when a book is sold via Lulu.com.
6969 But because of the non-commercial clause in the book license
6970 (CC-BY-NC), this might be a problem. To bypass the problem I
6971 discussed how to handle the revenue with the author, and we agreed
6972 that the revenue for these editions go to the
6973 <a href=
"https://creativecommons.org/
">Creative Commons non-profit
6974 Corporation
</a
> who handle donations to the Creative Commons project.
6975 So far they have earned around USD
70 on sales of the
6976 <a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-
22440520.html
">English
</a
>
6978 <a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-
22441576.html
">Norwegian
6979 Bokmål
</a
> editions, according to Lulu.com. They will get the revenue
6980 for the French edition too. Their revenue is higher if you buy the
6981 book directly from Lulu.com instead of via a book store, so I
6982 recommend you buy directly from Lulu.com.
</p
>
6984 <p
>Perhaps you would like to get the book published in your language?
6985 The translation is done using a web based translator service, so the
6986 technical bar to enter is fairly low. Get in touch if you would like
6987 to make this happen.
</p
>
6992 <title>Lets make a Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator
's Handbook
</title>
6993 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html
</link>
6994 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html
</guid>
6995 <pubDate>Sun,
10 Apr
2016 23:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6996 <description><p
>During this weekends
6997 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml
">bug
6998 squashing party and developer gathering
</a
>, we decided to do our part
6999 to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
7000 Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
7001 <a href=
"http://debian-handbook.info/
">Debian Administrator
's Handbook
7002 project
</a
> to get started. If you want to help out, please start
7004 <a href=
"https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/
">the
7005 hosted weblate project page
</a
>, and get in touch using
7006 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators
">the
7007 translators mailing list
</a
>. Please also check out
7008 <a href=
"https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/
">the instructions for
7009 contributors
</a
>.
</p
>
7011 <p
>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
7012 Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
7013 Bokmål too. In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
7014 Mobi versions available. And there are incomplete translations
7015 available for many more languages.
</p
>
7020 <title>One in two hundred Debian users using ZFS on Linux?
</title>
7021 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_in_two_hundred_Debian_users_using_ZFS_on_Linux_.html
</link>
7022 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_in_two_hundred_Debian_users_using_ZFS_on_Linux_.html
</guid>
7023 <pubDate>Thu,
7 Apr
2016 22:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
7024 <description><p
>Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
7025 packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found. I use
7026 ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
7027 But I might be wrong.
</p
>
7029 <p
>According to
7030 <a href=
"https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=spl-linux
">the popcon
7031 results for spl-linux
</a
>, there are
1019 Debian installations, or
7032 0.53% of the population, with the package installed. As far as I know
7033 the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
7034 on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
7035 installation on Linux in Debian. In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
7036 the ZFS feature is already available, and there
7037 <a href=
"https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=zfsutils
">the popcon
7038 results for zfsutils
</a
> show
1625 Debian installations or
0.84% of
7039 the population. So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.
</p
>
7041 <p
>But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
7042 <a href=
"https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/
2015/
04/msg00006.html
">announced
7043 in April
2015</a
> that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
7044 cleared, the package is still not in Debian. The package is again in
7045 the NEW queue. Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
7046 debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
7047 to give up. The current status can be seen on
7048 <a href=
"https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org
">the
7049 team status page
</a
>, and
7050 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git
">the
7051 source code
</a
> is available on Alioth.
</p
>
7053 <p
>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
7054 my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
7055 packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
7056 accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
7057 to help out the team. This was the background for my blog post about
7058 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html
">creating,
7059 updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically
</a
>, and I
7060 used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
7061 copyright file. It is not very easy to check every one of the around
7062 2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
7063 right. If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
7064 find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.
</p
>
7069 <title>syslog-trusted-timestamp - chain of trusted timestamps for your syslog
</title>
7070 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/syslog_trusted_timestamp___chain_of_trusted_timestamps_for_your_syslog.html
</link>
7071 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/syslog_trusted_timestamp___chain_of_trusted_timestamps_for_your_syslog.html
</guid>
7072 <pubDate>Sat,
2 Apr
2016 09:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
7073 <description><p
>Two years ago, I had
7074 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html
">a
7075 look at trusted timestamping options available
</a
>, and among
7076 other things noted a still open
7077 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
742553">bug in the tsget script
</a
>
7078 included in openssl that made it harder than necessary to use openssl
7079 as a trusted timestamping client. A few days ago I was told
7080 <a href=
"https:/www.difi.no/
">the Norwegian government office DIFI
</a
> is
7081 close to releasing their own trusted timestamp service, and in the
7082 process I was happy to learn about a replacement for the tsget script
7083 using only curl:
</p
>
7085 <p
><pre
>
7086 openssl ts -query -data
"/etc/shells
" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
7087 | curl -s -H
"Content-Type: application/timestamp-query
" \
7088 --data-binary
"@-
" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de
> etc-shells.tsr
7089 openssl ts -reply -text -in etc-shells.tsr
7090 </pre
></p
>
7092 <p
>This produces a binary timestamp file (etc-shells.tsr) which can be
7093 used to verify that the content of the file /etc/shell with the
7094 calculated sha256 hash existed at the point in time when the request
7095 was made. The last command extract the content of the etc-shells.tsr
7096 in human readable form. The idea behind such timestamp is to be able
7097 to prove using cryptography that the content of a file have not
7098 changed since the file was stamped.
</p
>
7100 <p
>To verify that the file on disk match the public key signature in
7101 the timestamp file, run the following commands. It make sure you have
7102 the required certificate for the trusted timestamp service available
7103 and use it to compare the file content with the timestamp. In
7104 production, one should of course use a better method to verify the
7105 service certificate.
</p
>
7107 <p
><pre
>
7108 wget -O ca-cert.txt https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
7109 openssl ts -verify -data /etc/shells -in etc-shells.tsr -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
7110 </pre
></p
>
7112 <p
>Wikipedia have a lot more information about
7113 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping
">trusted
7114 Timestamping
</a
> and
7115 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_timestamping
">linked
7116 timestamping
</a
>, and there are several trusted timestamping services
7117 around, both as commercial services and as free and public services.
7119 <a href=
"https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/
">the
7120 zeitstempel.dfn.de service
</a
> mentioned above and
7121 <a href=
"https://freetsa.org/
">freetsa.org service
</a
> linked to from the
7122 wikipedia web site. I believe the DIFI service should show up on
7123 https://tsa.difi.no, but it is not available to the public at the
7124 moment. I hope this will change when it is into production. The
7125 <a href=
"https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161
">RFC
3161</a
> trusted
7126 timestamping protocol standard is even implemented in LibreOffice,
7127 Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat, making it possible to verify when
7128 a document was created.
</p
>
7130 <p
>I would find it useful to be able to use such trusted timestamp
7131 service to make it possible to verify that my stored syslog files have
7132 not been tampered with. This is not a new idea. I found one example
7133 implemented on the Endian network appliances where
7134 <a href=
"http://help.endian.com/entries/
21518508-Enabling-Timestamping-on-log-files-
">the
7135 configuration of such feature was described in
2012</a
>.
</p
>
7137 <p
>But I could not find any free implementation of such feature when I
7138 searched, so I decided to try to
7139 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp
">build
7140 a prototype named syslog-trusted-timestamp
</a
>. My idea is to
7141 generate a timestamp of the old log files after they are rotated, and
7142 store the timestamp in the new log file just after rotation. This
7143 will form a chain that would make it possible to see if any old log
7144 files are tampered with. But syslog is bad at handling kilobytes of
7145 binary data, so I decided to base64 encode the timestamp and add an ID
7146 and line sequence numbers to the base64 data to make it possible to
7147 reassemble the timestamp file again. To use it, simply run it like
7150 <p
><pre
>
7151 syslog-trusted-timestamp /path/to/list-of-log-files
7152 </pre
></p
>
7154 <p
>This will send a timestamp from one or more timestamp services (not
7155 yet decided nor implemented) for each listed file to the syslog using
7156 logger(
1). To verify the timestamp, the same program is used with the
7157 --verify option:
</p
>
7159 <p
><pre
>
7160 syslog-trusted-timestamp --verify /path/to/log-file /path/to/log-with-timestamp
7161 </pre
></p
>
7163 <p
>The verification step is not yet well designed. The current
7164 implementation depend on the file path being unique and unchanging,
7165 and this is not a solid assumption. It also uses process number as
7166 timestamp ID, and this is bound to create ID collisions. I hope to
7167 have time to come up with a better way to handle timestamp IDs and
7168 verification later.
</p
>
7170 <p
>Please check out
7171 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp
">the
7172 prototype for syslog-trusted-timestamp on github
</a
> and send
7173 suggestions and improvement, or let me know if there already exist a
7174 similar system for timestamping logs already to allow me to join
7175 forces with others with the same interest.
</p
>
7177 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
7178 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
7179 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
7184 <title>Full battery stats collector is now available in Debian
</title>
7185 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Full_battery_stats_collector_is_now_available_in_Debian.html
</link>
7186 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Full_battery_stats_collector_is_now_available_in_Debian.html
</guid>
7187 <pubDate>Wed,
23 Mar
2016 22:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7188 <description><p
>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
7189 extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
7190 later processing and graphing. The original collector store the
7191 battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
7192 collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
7193 full level, last full level and current battery level. This make it
7194 possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
7195 the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.
</p
>
7197 <p
>The new tools are available in
<tt
>/usr/share/battery-stats/
</tt
>
7198 in the version
0.5.1 package in unstable. Get the new battery level graph
7199 and lifetime prediction by running:
7201 <p
><pre
>
7202 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
7203 </pre
></p
>
7205 <p
>Or select the
'Battery Level Graph
' from your application menu.
</p
>
7207 <p
>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
7208 entry yet):
</p
>
7210 <p
><pre
>
7211 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
7212 </pre
></p
>
7214 <p
>I
'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
7215 when there are few data points. The graphs look a bit better with a
7216 few years of data.
</p
>
7218 <p
>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
7219 collector broke in Debian. The scripts in
7220 <tt
>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/
</tt
> were no longer executed. I
7221 suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
7222 know. The issue is reported as
7223 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
818649">bug #
818649</a
> against
7224 pm-utils. I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call
7225 the collector script every time the power connector is connected and
7226 disconnected. With this fix in place it was finally time to make a
7227 new release of the package, and get it into Debian.
</p
>
7229 <p
>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
7231 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats
">battery-stats
</a
>
7232 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
7233 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
7234 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats
">github
</a
>.
7235 As always, patches are very welcome.
</p
>
7240 <title>UsingQR -
"Electronic
" paper invoices using JSON and QR codes
</title>
7241 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/UsingQR____Electronic__paper_invoices_using_JSON_and_QR_codes.html
</link>
7242 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/UsingQR____Electronic__paper_invoices_using_JSON_and_QR_codes.html
</guid>
7243 <pubDate>Sat,
19 Mar
2016 09:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7244 <description><p
>Back in
2013 I proposed
7245 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html
">a
7246 way to make paper and PDF invoices easier to process electronically by
7247 adding a QR code with the key information about the invoice
</a
>. I
7248 suggested using vCard field definition, to get some standard format
7249 for name and address, but any format would work. I did not do
7250 anything about the proposal, but hoped someone one day would make
7251 something like it. It would make it possible to efficiently send
7252 machine readable invoices directly between seller and buyer.
</p
>
7254 <p
>This was the background when I came across a proposal and
7255 specification from the web based accounting and invoicing supplier
7256 <a href=
"http://www.visma.com/
">Visma
</a
> in Sweden called
7257 <a href=
"http://usingqr.com/
">UsingQR
</a
>. Their PDF invoices contain
7258 a QR code with the key information of the invoice in JSON format.
7259 This is the typical content of a QR code following the UsingQR
7260 specification (based on a real world example, some numbers replaced to
7261 get a more bogus entry). I
've reformatted the JSON to make it easier
7262 to read. Normally this is all on one long line:
</p
>
7264 <p
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2016-
03-
19-qr-invoice.png
" align=
"right
"><pre
>
7266 "vh
":
500.00,
7271 "nme
":
"Din Leverandør
",
7272 "cc
":
"NO
",
7273 "cid
":
"997912345 MVA
",
7274 "iref
":
"12300001",
7275 "idt
":
"20151022",
7276 "ddt
":
"20151105",
7277 "due
":
2500.0000,
7278 "cur
":
"NOK
",
7279 "pt
":
"BBAN
",
7280 "acc
":
"17202612345",
7281 "bc
":
"BIENNOK1
",
7282 "adr
":
"0313 OSLO
"
7284 </pre
></p
>
7286 </p
>The interpretation of the fields can be found in the
7287 <a href=
"http://usingqr.com/wp-content/uploads/
2014/
06/UsingQR_specification1.pdf
">format
7288 specification
</a
> (revision
2 from june
2014). The format seem to
7289 have most of the information needed to handle accounting and payment
7290 of invoices, at least the fields I have needed so far here in
7293 <p
>Unfortunately, the site and document do not mention anything about
7294 the patent, trademark and copyright status of the format and the
7295 specification. Because of this, I asked the people behind it back in
7296 November to clarify. Ann-Christine Savlid (ann-christine.savlid (at)
7297 visma.com) replied that Visma had not applied for patent or trademark
7298 protection for this format, and that there were no copyright based
7299 usage limitations for the format. I urged her to make sure this was
7300 explicitly written on the web pages and in the specification, but
7301 unfortunately this has not happened yet. So I guess if there is
7302 submarine patents, hidden trademarks or a will to sue for copyright
7303 infringements, those starting to use the UsingQR format might be at
7304 risk, but if this happen there is some legal defense in the fact that
7305 the people behind the format claimed it was safe to do so. At least
7306 with patents, there is always
7307 <a href=
"http://www.paperspecs.com/paper-news/beware-the-qr-code-patent-trap/
">a
7308 chance of getting sued...
</a
></p
>
7310 <p
>I also asked if they planned to maintain the format in an
7311 independent standard organization to give others more confidence that
7312 they would participate in the standardization process on equal terms
7313 with Visma, but they had no immediate plans for this. Their plan was
7314 to work with banks to try to get more users of the format, and
7315 evaluate the way forward if the format proved to be popular. I hope
7316 they conclude that using an open standard organisation like
7317 <a href=
"http://www.ietf.org/
">IETF
</a
> is the correct place to
7318 maintain such specification.
</p
>
7320 <p
><strong
>Update
2016-
03-
20</strong
>: Via Twitter I became aware of
7321 <a href=
"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=
11319492">some comments
7322 about this blog post
</a
> that had several useful links and references to
7323 similar systems. In the Czech republic, the Czech Banking Association
7324 standard #
26, with short name SPAYD, uses QR codes with payment
7325 information. More information is available from the Wikipedia page on
7326 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Payment_Descriptor
">Short
7327 Payment Descriptor
</a
>. And in Germany, there is a system named
7328 <a href=
"http://www.bezahlcode.de/
">BezahlCode
</a
>,
7329 (
<a href=
"http://www.bezahlcode.de/wp-content/uploads/BezahlCode_TechDok.pdf
">specification
7330 v1.8
2013-
12-
05 available as PDF
</a
>), which uses QR codes with
7331 URL-like formatting using
"bank:
" as the URI schema/protocol to
7332 provide the payment information. There is also the
7333 <a href=
"http://www.ferd-net.de/front_content.php?idcat=
231">ZUGFeRD
</a
>
7334 file format that perhaps could be transfered using QR codes, but I am
7335 not sure if it is done already. Last, in Bolivia there are reports
7336 that tax information since november
2014 need to be printed in QR
7337 format on invoices. I have not been able to track down a
7338 specification for this format, because of my limited language skill
7344 <title>Making battery measurements a little easier in Debian
</title>
7345 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_battery_measurements_a_little_easier_in_Debian.html
</link>
7346 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_battery_measurements_a_little_easier_in_Debian.html
</guid>
7347 <pubDate>Tue,
15 Mar
2016 15:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7348 <description><p
>Back in September, I blogged about
7349 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html
">the
7350 system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery
</a
>, and
7351 how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced). I
7352 created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
7353 but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
7354 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats
">a battery-stats
7355 package in Debian
</a
> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
7356 a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
7357 fixed instead. I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
7358 hoped someone would step in and fix it. But no-one did.
</p
>
7360 <p
>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
7361 hands. The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
7362 battery stats (
<a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats
">available from github
</a
>) and part of the team maintaining
7363 battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
7364 able to collect battery status using the
<tt
>/sys/class/power_supply/
</tt
>
7365 information provided by the Linux kernel. If you install the
7366 battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
7367 graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
7368 status of the battery. The source package build and work just fine in
7369 Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
7370 tested). The default graph you get for that system look like this:
</p
>
7372 <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
>
7374 <p
>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
7375 battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
7376 about the battery. The scripts are merged into the upstream
7377 battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
7378 yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way. Will have to test a
7379 bit more before I make a new release.
</p
>
7381 <p
>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
7382 suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
7383 impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
7384 and graphing.
</p
>
7386 <p
>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
7387 battery, check out the battery-stats package in
7388 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats
">Debian
</a
> and
7390 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats
">github
</a
>.
7391 I would love some help to improve the system further.
</p
>
7396 <title>Creating, updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically
</title>
7397 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html
</link>
7398 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html
</guid>
7399 <pubDate>Fri,
19 Feb
2016 15:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7400 <description><p
>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
7401 details. And one of the details is the content of the
7402 debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
7403 the code in the package in question, preferably in
7404 <a href=
"https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/
1.0/
">machine
7405 readable DEP5 format
</a
>.
</p
>
7407 <p
>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
7408 and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
7409 package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters. So getting it right
7410 the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
7411 both you and the ftpmasters some work.. Today, while trying to figure
7412 out what was wrong with
7413 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=
686447">the
7414 zfsonlinux copyright file
</a
>, I decided to spend some time on
7415 figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
7416 semi-automatically.
</p
>
7418 <p
>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
7419 file based on the code in the source package,
7420 <tt
><a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake
">debmake
</a
></tt
>
7421 and
<tt
><a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme
">cme
</a
></tt
>. I
'm
7422 not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
7423 create a sensible draft file. As far as I can tell, none of them can
7424 be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
7425 polished a bit before the file is OK to upload. I found the debmake
7427 <a href=
"http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/
2014/
07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-
5.html
">a
7428 blog posts from
2014</a
>.
7430 <p
>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
7432 <p
><pre
>
7433 debmake -cc
> debian/copyright
7434 </pre
></p
>
7436 <p
>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
7437 this might not be the best option.
</p
>
7439 <p
>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
7441 <a href=
"https://ddumont.wordpress.com/
2015/
04/
05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/
">a
7442 blog post from
2015</a
>. To generate using cme, use the
'update
7443 dpkg-copyright
' option:
7445 <p
><pre
>
7446 cme update dpkg-copyright
7447 </pre
></p
>
7449 <p
>This will create or update debian/copyright. The cme tool seem to
7450 handle UTF-
8 names better than debmake.
</p
>
7452 <p
>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
7453 check if the file is correct. For this I found two good options,
7454 <tt
>debmake -k
</tt
> and
<tt
>license-reconcile
</tt
>. The former seem
7455 to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
7456 ineffective blocks in the copyright file. The latter reports missing
7457 copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
7458 names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-
1.0). I suspect it is good to use both and
7459 fix all issues reported by them before uploading. But I do not know
7460 if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
7461 copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.
</p
>
7463 <p
>The devscripts tool
<tt
>licensecheck
</tt
> deserve mentioning. It
7464 will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
7465 It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
7466 can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.
</p
>
7468 <p
>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
7469 debian/copyright file. Please let me know, or blog about it on
7470 planet.debian.org.
</p
>
7472 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
7473 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
7474 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
7476 <p
><strong
>Update
2016-
02-
20</strong
>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
7477 on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
7479 <p
><pre
>
7480 licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
7481 /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5
> debian/copyright.auto
7482 </pre
></p
>
7484 <p
>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
7485 version control system to make it easier to discover license and
7486 copyright changes in the upstream source. I will try to do the same
7487 with my packages in the future.
</p
>
7489 <p
><strong
>Update
2016-
02-
21</strong
>: The cme author recommended
7490 against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
7491 command line.
</p
>
7496 <title>Using appstream in Debian to locate packages with firmware and mime type support
</title>
7497 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_in_Debian_to_locate_packages_with_firmware_and_mime_type_support.html
</link>
7498 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_in_Debian_to_locate_packages_with_firmware_and_mime_type_support.html
</guid>
7499 <pubDate>Thu,
4 Feb
2016 16:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7500 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-
11">appstream system
</a
>
7501 is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
7502 convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
7503 firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it. This can
7504 be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
7507 <p
>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
7508 file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-
3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
7509 picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
7510 unstable. In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
7511 by the kernel during kernel module loading. To find the package
7512 providing the example file, do like this:
</p
>
7514 <blockquote
><pre
>
7515 % apt install appstream
7519 % appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-
3.2.3.0.bin | \
7520 awk
'/Package:/ {print $
2}
'
7523 </pre
></blockquote
>
7525 <p
>See
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines
">the
7526 appstream wiki
</a
> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
7527 a way appstream can use.
</p
>
7529 <p
>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
7530 given MIME type. This is very useful when you get a file you do not
7531 know how to handle. First find the mime type using
<tt
>file
7532 --mime-type
</tt
>, and next look up the package providing support for
7533 it. Lets say you got an SVG file. Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
7534 and you can find all packages handling this type like this:
</p
>
7536 <blockquote
><pre
>
7537 % apt install appstream
7541 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
7542 awk
'/Package:/ {print $
2}
'
7564 </pre
></blockquote
>
7566 <p
>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
7567 packages providing appstream metadata.
</p
>
7572 <title>Creepy, visualise geotagged social media information - nice free software
</title>
7573 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html
</link>
7574 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html
</guid>
7575 <pubDate>Sun,
24 Jan
2016 10:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7576 <description><p
>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
7577 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
7578 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
7579 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent). And if their
7580 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
7581 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
7582 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
7583 during installation). And when these programs send out information to
7584 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
7585 extra care is taken to not send the location. The provided
7586 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
7587 good and bad, depend on your point of view). What is certain, is that
7588 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
7589 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
7590 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
7593 <p align=
"center
"><img width=
"70%
" src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2016-
01-
24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png
"></p
>
7595 <p
>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
7596 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing. It is
7597 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
7598 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
7599 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information. But the
7600 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
7601 tool to do so is called
7602 <a href=
"http://www.geocreepy.com/
">Creepy or Cree.py
</a
>. I
7603 discovered it when I read
7604 <a href=
"http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-
7787884.html
">an
7605 article about Creepy
</a
> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
7606 November
2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
7607 The python program was in Debian, but
7608 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy
">the version in
7609 Debian
</a
> was completely broken and practically unmaintained. I
7610 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
7611 have time to fix it then. This Christmas I decided to finally try to
7612 get Creepy operational in Debian. Now a fixed version is available in
7613 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
7615 <a href=
"https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy
">upstream
</a
>.
</p
>
7617 <p
>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
7618 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
7619 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
7620 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
7621 these services. Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
7622 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
7623 days it is impossible. This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
7624 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
7625 information to them about your search interests. This should be taken
7626 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
7627 about yourself with the services.
</p
>
7629 <p
>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
7630 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
7631 of Norway. One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
7632 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
7633 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
7634 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
7635 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
7636 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
7637 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
7638 things. A similar technique have been
7639 <a href=
"http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl
">used
7640 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine
</a
>, and it is both a powerful
7641 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
7642 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
7645 <p
>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
7646 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
7647 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
7648 python-requests-toolbelt).
</p
>
7650 <p
>(I have uploaded
7651 <a href=
"https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy
">the image to
7652 screenshots.debian.net
</a
> and licensed it under the same terms as the
7653 Creepy program in Debian.)
</p
>
7658 <title>Always download Debian packages using Tor - the simple recipe
</title>
7659 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Always_download_Debian_packages_using_Tor___the_simple_recipe.html
</link>
7660 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Always_download_Debian_packages_using_Tor___the_simple_recipe.html
</guid>
7661 <pubDate>Fri,
15 Jan
2016 00:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7662 <description><p
>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
7663 <a href=
"https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/
331/what-is-to-be-done/
">observed
7664 that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
7665 believe a computer have a given security hole
</a
> if it download a
7666 security fix from a Debian mirror. This is a good reason to always
7667 use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
7668 listening do not know which IP address to attack. In August, Richard
7669 Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
7670 to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
7671 download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
7672 <a href=
"http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/
2015/
08/
24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/
">proposed
7673 to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror
</a
>. He
7674 was not the first to propose this, as the
7675 <tt
><a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor
">apt-transport-tor
</a
></tt
>
7676 package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
7677 to use
<a href=
"https://www.torproject.org/
">Tor
</a
>, but I was not
7678 aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.
</p
>
7680 <p
>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
7681 sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
7682 Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
7683 it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
7684 making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.
</p
>
7686 <p
>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
7687 installing
<tt
>apt-transport-tor
</tt
> and replacing http and https
7688 urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
7689 of the official Debian mirror site. I recommend installing
7690 <tt
>etckeeper
</tt
> before you start to have a history of the changes
7691 done in /etc/.
</p
>
7693 <blockquote
><pre
>
7694 apt install apt-transport-tor
7695 sed -i
's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%
' /etc/apt/sources.list
7696 sed -i
's% http% tor+http%
' /etc/apt/sources.list
7697 </pre
></blockquote
>
7699 <p
>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
7700 the sed commands for these too. The sed command is assuming your are
7701 using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror. Adjust the command (or just
7702 edit the file manually) to match your mirror.
</p
>
7704 <p
>This work in Debian Jessie and later. Note that tools like
7705 <tt
>apt-file
</tt
> only recently started using the apt transport
7706 system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs. For
7707 <tt
>apt-file
</tt
> you need the version currently in experimental,
7708 which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable. So if you
7709 need a working
<tt
>apt-file
</tt
>, this is not for you.
</p
>
7711 <p
>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
7712 using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
7713 update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
7714 masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine. Using Tor will
7715 become normal for the machine in question.
</p
>
7717 <p
>On
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
">Freedombox
</a
>, APT
7718 is set up by default to use
<tt
>apt-transport-tor
</tt
> when Tor is
7719 enabled. It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
7725 <title>OpenALPR, find car license plates in video streams - nice free software
</title>
7726 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenALPR__find_car_license_plates_in_video_streams___nice_free_software.html
</link>
7727 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenALPR__find_car_license_plates_in_video_streams___nice_free_software.html
</guid>
7728 <pubDate>Wed,
23 Dec
2015 01:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7729 <description><p
>When I was a kid, we used to collect
"car numbers
", as we used to
7730 call the car license plate numbers in those days. I would write the
7731 numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
7732 to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
7733 exotic or special region codes and numbers. It was a fun game to pass
7734 time, as we kids have plenty of it.
</p
>
7736 <p
>A few days I came across
7737 <a href=
"https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr
">the OpenALPR
7738 project
</a
>, a free software project to automatically discover and
7739 report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
7740 "car numbers
" in a machine readable format. I
've been looking for
7741 such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
7742 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition
">automatic
7743 number plate recognition
</a
> tool only is available in the hands of
7744 the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
7745 even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance. I
7746 discovered the developer
7747 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
747509">wanted to get the tool into
7748 Debian
</a
>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
7749 help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
7752 <p
>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
7753 it into Debian, where it currently
7754 <a href=
"https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2
.1-
1.html
">waits
7755 in the NEW queue
</a
> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.
</p
>
7757 <p
>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
7758 for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
7759 surveillance system? Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
7760 and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
7761 when number plates on my watch list are discovered. Another use case
7762 was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
7763 to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
7764 car. When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
7765 capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
7766 open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway. I
7767 guess for such use case it make sense. I am sure there are other use
7768 cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.
</p
>
7770 <p
>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
7771 out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
7772 before running
"debuild
" to build the source. Or wait a bit until the
7773 package show up in unstable.
</p
>
7778 <title>Using appstream with isenkram to install hardware related packages in Debian
</title>
7779 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html
</link>
7780 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html
</guid>
7781 <pubDate>Sun,
20 Dec
2015 12:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7782 <description><p
>Around three years ago, I created
7783 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram
">the isenkram
7784 system
</a
> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
7785 hardware related packages. A GUI system in the isenkram package will
7786 present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
7787 relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine. The same
7788 lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
7789 tools in the isenkram-cli package. In addition to mapping hardware,
7790 it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
7791 install needed firmware packages automatically. The key for this
7792 system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
7793 words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
7796 <p
>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
7797 adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
7798 time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
7799 I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
7800 the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
7801 was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
7802 <a href=
"http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/
">the
7803 appstream system
</a
> was announced. I got in touch and suggested to
7804 add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
7805 appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
7806 Debian version of appstream.
</p
>
7808 <p
>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
7809 and today I uploaded a new version
0.20 of isenkram adding support for
7810 appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages. The only
7811 package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
7812 pymissile package. I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
7813 how do add the required
7814 <a href=
"https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html
">metadata
7815 in pymissile
</a
>. I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
7816 this content:
</p
>
7818 <blockquote
><pre
>
7819 &lt;?xml version=
"1.0" encoding=
"UTF-
8"?
&gt;
7820 &lt;component
&gt;
7821 &lt;id
&gt;pymissile
&lt;/id
&gt;
7822 &lt;metadata_license
&gt;MIT
&lt;/metadata_license
&gt;
7823 &lt;name
&gt;pymissile
&lt;/name
&gt;
7824 &lt;summary
&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
&lt;/summary
&gt;
7825 &lt;description
&gt;
7827 Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
7828 Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
7829 motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
7832 &lt;/description
&gt;
7833 &lt;provides
&gt;
7834 &lt;modalias
&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*
&lt;/modalias
&gt;
7835 &lt;/provides
&gt;
7836 &lt;/component
&gt;
7837 </pre
></blockquote
>
7839 <p
>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
7840 which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
7841 (modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel. In this case, it
7842 will map to all USB devices with vendor code
1130 and product code
7845 <p
>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
7846 are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
7847 appstream files. Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
7848 these files. A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
7849 it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
7850 (in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use). But
7851 it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
7852 upstream for this project is dormant.
</p
>
7854 <p
>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
7855 mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
7856 appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
7857 package under /usr/share/appdata/. I did this by adding the following
7858 line to debian/pymissile.install:
</p
>
7860 <blockquote
><pre
>
7861 debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
7862 </pre
></blockquote
>
7864 <p
>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
7865 all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
7866 pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
7867 installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
7870 <p
>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
7871 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-
11">DEP-
11</a
> proposal.
</p
>
7873 <p
>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
7874 try running this command on the command line:
</p
>
7876 <blockquote
><pre
>
7877 cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
7878 </pre
></blockquote
>
7880 <p
>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
7881 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/
">my
7882 blog posts tagged isenkram
</a
>.
</p
>
7887 <title>The GNU General Public License is not magic pixie dust
</title>
7888 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_GNU_General_Public_License_is_not_magic_pixie_dust.html
</link>
7889 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_GNU_General_Public_License_is_not_magic_pixie_dust.html
</guid>
7890 <pubDate>Mon,
30 Nov
2015 09:
55:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7891 <description><p
>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
7892 "<a href=
"http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/
2015/
11/
27/sfc-supporter/
">The
7893 GPL is not magic pixie dust
</a
>" explain the importance of making sure
7894 the
<a href=
"http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
">GPL
</a
> is enforced.
7895 I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:
<p
>
7899 <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
>
7902 The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.
<br/
>
7904 The first step is to choose a
7905 <a href=
"https://copyleft.org/
">copyleft
</a
> license for your
7908 The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
7909 <b
>it must be enforced
</b
><br/
>
7911 and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
7914 is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
7917 <p
><small
>--
<a href=
"http://ebb.org/bkuhn/
">Bradley Kuhn
</a
>, in
7918 <a href=
"http://faif.us/
" title=
"Free as in Freedom
">FaiF
</a
>
7919 <a href=
"http://faif.us/cast/
2015/nov/
24/
0x57/
">episode
7920 0x57</a
></small
></p
>
7922 <p
>As the Debian Website
7923 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
794116">used
</a
>
7924 <a href=
"https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=
1.24&amp;r2=
1.25">to
</a
>
7925 imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
7926 the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
7927 software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
7928 software products. Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
7929 to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
7930 such licenses are not enough. With the ongoing adoption of Free
7931 Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community
's
7932 expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
7933 ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always. As Karen
7934 and Bradley explained in
<a href=
"http://faif.us/
" title=
"Free as in
7935 Freedom
">FaiF
</a
>
7936 <a href=
"http://faif.us/cast/
2015/nov/
24/
0x57/
">episode
0x57</a
>,
7937 copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
7938 to protect it. The reality of today
's world is that legal
7939 representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming. With
7940 <a href=
"http://gpl-violations.org/
">gpl-violations.org
</a
> in hiatus
7941 <a href=
"http://gpl-violations.org/news/
20151027-homepage-recovers/
">until
</a
>
7942 some time in
2016, the
<a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/
">Software
7943 Freedom Conservancy
</a
> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
7944 of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
7945 In March the SFC supported a
7946 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/news/
2015/mar/
05/vmware-lawsuit/
">lawsuit
7947 by Christoph Hellwig
</a
> against VMware for refusing to
7948 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html
">comply
7949 with the GPL
</a
> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
7950 kernel. Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
7952 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/blog/
2015/nov/
24/faif-carols-fundraiser/
">blocked
7953 or cancelled their talks
</a
>. As a result they have decided to rely
7954 less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
7955 individuals who support Free Software and copyleft. So the SFC has
7956 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/news/
2015/nov/
23/
2015fundraiser/
">launched
</a
>
7957 a
<a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/
">campaign
</a
> to create
7958 a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
7959 supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
7962 <p
>If you support Free Software,
7963 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/blog/
2015/nov/
26/like-what-I-do/
">like
</a
>
7964 what the SFC do, agree with their
7965 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html
">compliance
7966 principles
</a
>, are happy about their
7967 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/
">successes
</a
> in
2015,
7968 work on a project that is an SFC
7969 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/
">member
</a
> and or
7970 just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
7971 <a href=
"https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA
">Christopher
7972 Allan Webber
</a
>,
7973 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/blog/
2015/nov/
24/faif-carols-fundraiser/
">Carol
7975 <a href=
"http://www.jonobacon.org/
2015/
11/
25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/
">Jono
7976 Bacon
</a
>, myself and
7977 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters
">others
</a
> in
7979 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/
">supporter
</a
>. For the
7980 next week your donation will be
7981 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/news/
2015/nov/
27/black-friday/
">matched
</a
>
7982 by an anonymous donor. Please also consider asking your employer to
7983 match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC. Don
't forget to
7984 spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
7985 social media accounts.
</p
>
7989 <p
>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
7990 of Software Freedom Conservancy myself. Perhaps you should be a
7991 supporter too?
</p
>
7996 <title>PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9
</title>
7997 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html
</link>
7998 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html
</guid>
7999 <pubDate>Tue,
17 Nov
2015 10:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
8000 <description><p
>I
've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
8001 set it up properly. I wanted to generate it offline and have it
8002 available on
<a href=
"http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp
">a OpenPGP
8003 smart card
</a
> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
8004 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever. But
8005 finally I
've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
8006 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key. See
8007 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2015-
11-
17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt
">the
8008 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key
</a
> for
8009 the details. This is my new key:
</p
>
8012 pub
3936R/
<a href=
"http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/
111D6B29EE4E02F9.html
">111D6B29EE4E02F9
</a
> 2015-
11-
03 [expires:
2019-
11-
14]
8013 Key fingerprint =
3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87
78F1 D827
111D
6B29 EE4E
02F9
8014 uid Petter Reinholdtsen
&lt;pere@hungry.com
&gt;
8015 uid Petter Reinholdtsen
&lt;pere@debian.org
&gt;
8016 sub
4096R/
87BAFB0E
2015-
11-
03 [expires:
2019-
11-
02]
8017 sub
4096R/F91E6DE9
2015-
11-
03 [expires:
2019-
11-
02]
8018 sub
4096R/A0439BAB
2015-
11-
03 [expires:
2019-
11-
02]
8021 <p
>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
8022 my old key.
</p
>
8024 <p
>If you signed my old key
8025 (
<a href=
"http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html
">DB4CCC4B2A30D729
</a
>),
8026 I
'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
8027 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
8028 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.
</p
>
8033 <title>Is Pentagon deciding the Norwegian negotiating position on Internet governance?
</title>
8034 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Pentagon_deciding_the_Norwegian_negotiating_position_on_Internet_governance_.html
</link>
8035 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Pentagon_deciding_the_Norwegian_negotiating_position_on_Internet_governance_.html
</guid>
8036 <pubDate>Tue,
3 Nov
2015 13:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
8037 <description><p
>In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a
8038 list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices.
8039 Internal notes should also be documented. The document list (called a mail
8040 journal -
"postjournal
" in Norwegian) is public information and thanks
8041 to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail
8042 journal is available for everyone. Most offices even publish the mail
8043 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
8044 <a href=
"https://www.oep.no/
">Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal -
8045 OEP
</a
>) to make it possible to search the entries in the list. Not
8046 all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to
8047 use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting
8048 journal entries .
</p
>
8050 <p
>In
2012 I came across a document in the mail journal for the
8051 Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications on OEP that
8052 piqued my interest. The title of the document was
8053 "<a href=
"https://www.oep.no/search/resultSingle.html?journalPostId=
4192362">Internet
8054 Governance and how it affects national security
</a
>" (Norwegian:
8055 "Internet Governance og påvirkning på nasjonal sikkerhet
"). The
8056 document date was
2012-
05-
22, and it was said to be sent from the
8057 "Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations
". I asked for a
8058 copy, but my request was rejected with a reference to a legal clause said to authorize them to reject it
8059 (
<a href=
"http://lovdata.no/lov/
2006-
05-
19-
16/§
20">offentleglova §
20,
8060 letter c
</a
>) and an explanation that the document was exempt because
8061 of foreign policy interests as it contained information related to the
8062 Norwegian negotiating position, negotiating strategies or similar. I
8063 was told the information in the document related to the ongoing
8064 negotiation in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The
8065 explanation made sense to me in early January
2013, as a ITU
8066 conference in Dubay discussing Internet Governance
8067 (
<a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication_Union#World_Conference_on_International_Telecommunications_2012_
.28WCIT-
12.29">World
8068 Conference on International Telecommunications - WCIT-
12</a
>) had just
8070 <a href=
"http://www.digi.no/kommentarer/
2012/
12/
18/tvil-om-usas-rolle-pa-teletoppmote
">reportedly
8071 in chaos
</a
> when USA walked out of the negotiations and
25 countries
8072 including Norway refused to sign the new treaty. It seemed
8073 reasonable to believe talks were still going on a few weeks later.
8074 Norway was represented at the ITU meeting by two authorities, the
8075 <a href=
"http://www.nkom.no/
">Norwegian Communications Authority
</a
>
8076 and the
<a href=
"https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dep/sd/
">Ministry of
8077 Transport and Communications
</a
>. This might be the reason the letter
8078 was sent to the ministry. As I was unable to find the document in the
8079 mail journal of any Norwegian UN mission, I asked the ministry who had
8080 sent the document to the ministry, and was told that it was the Deputy
8081 Permanent Representative with the Permanent Mission of Norway in
8084 <p
>Three years later, I was still curious about the content of that
8085 document, and again asked for a copy, believing the negotiation was
8087 <a href=
"https://mimesbronn.no/request/kopi_av_dokumenter_i_sak_2012914
">I
8088 asked both the Ministry of Transport and Communications as the
8089 receiver
</a
> and
8090 <a href=
"https://mimesbronn.no/request/brev_om_internet_governance_og_p
">asked
8091 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva as the sender
</a
> for a
8092 copy, to see if they both agreed that it should be withheld from the
8093 public. The ministry upheld its rejection quoting the same law
8094 reference as before, while the permanent mission rejected it quoting a
8096 (
<a href=
"http://lovdata.no/lov/
2006-
05-
19-
16/§
20">offentleglova §
20
8097 letter b
</a
>), claiming that they were required to keep the
8098 content of the document from the public because it contained
8099 information given to Norway with the expressed or implied expectation
8100 that the information should not be made public. I asked the permanent
8101 mission for an explanation, and was told that the document contained
8102 an account from a meeting held in the Pentagon for a limited group of NATO
8103 nations where the organiser of the meeting did not intend the content
8104 of the meeting to be publicly known. They explained that giving me a
8105 copy might cause Norway to not get access to similar information in
8106 the future and thus hurt the future foreign interests of Norway. They
8107 also explained that the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was not
8108 the author of the document, they only got a copy of it, and because of
8109 this had not listed it in their mail journal.
</p
>
8111 <p
>Armed with this
8112 knowledge I asked the Ministry to reconsider and asked who was the
8113 author of the document, now realising that it was not same as the
8114 "sender
" according to Ministry of Transport and Communications. The
8115 ministry upheld its rejection but told me the name of the author of
8116 the document. According to
8117 <a href=
"https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/unga69_rapport1/id2001204/
">a
8118 government report
</a
> the author was with the Permanent Mission of
8119 Norway in New York a bit more than a year later (
2014-
09-
22), so I
8120 guessed that might be the office responsible for writing and sending
8121 the report initially and
8122 <a href=
"https://www.mimesbronn.no/request/mote_2012_i_pentagon_om_itu
">asked
8123 them for a copy
</a
> but I was obviously wrong as I was told that the
8124 document was unknown to them and that the author did not work there
8125 when the document was written. Next, I asked the Permanent Mission of
8126 Norway in Geneva and the Foreign Ministry to reconsider and at least
8127 tell me who sent the document to Deputy Permanent Representative with
8128 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva. The Foreign Ministry also
8129 upheld its rejection, but told me that the person sending the document
8130 to Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was the defence attaché with
8131 the Norwegian Embassy in Washington. I do not know if this is the
8132 same person as the author of the document.
</p
>
8134 <p
>If I understand the situation correctly, someone capable of
8135 inviting selected NATO nations to a meeting in Pentagon organised a
8136 meeting where someone representing the Norwegian defence attaché in
8137 Washington attended, and the account from this meeting is interpreted
8138 by the Ministry of Transport and Communications to expose Norways
8139 negotiating position, negotiating strategies and similar regarding the
8140 ITU negotiations on Internet Governance. It is truly amazing what can
8141 be derived from mere meta-data.
</p
>
8143 <p
>I wonder which NATO countries besides Norway attended this meeting?
8144 And what exactly was said and done at the meeting? Anyone know?
</p
>
8149 <title>New book,
"Fri kultur
" by @lessig, a Norwegian Bokmål translation of
"Free Culture
" from
2004</title>
8150 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_book___Fri_kultur__by__lessig__a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of__Free_Culture__from_2004.html
</link>
8151 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_book___Fri_kultur__by__lessig__a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of__Free_Culture__from_2004.html
</guid>
8152 <pubDate>Sat,
31 Oct
2015 09:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
8153 <description><p
>People keep asking me where to get the various forms of the book I
8154 published last week, the Norwegian Bokmål edition of Lawrence Lessigs
8155 book
<a href=
"http://www.free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
>. It was
8156 published on paper via lulu.com, and is also available in PDF, ePub
8157 and MOBI format. I currently sell the paper edition for self cost
8158 from lulu.com, but might extend the distribution to book stores like
8159 Amazon and Barnes
& Noble later. This will double the price and force
8160 me to make a profit from selling the book. Anyway, here are links to
8161 get the book in different formats:
</p
>
8165 <li
><a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-
22406445.html
">Buy
8166 paper edition from lulu.com
</a
></li
>
8168 <li
><a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf
">Download
8169 PDF, size
7.9 MiB
</a
> (gratis/free)
</li
>
8171 <li
><a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub
">Download
8172 ePub, size
11 MiB
</a
> (gratis/free)
</li
>
8174 <li
><a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.mobi
">Download
8175 MOBI, size
3.8 MiB
</a
> (gratis/free)
</li
>
8179 <p
>Note that the MOBI version have problems with the table of content,
8180 at least with the viewers I have been able to test. And the ePub file
8181 have several problems according to
8182 <a href=
"https://github.com/IDPF/epubcheck
">epubcheck
</a
>, but seem
8183 to display fine in the viewers I have tested. All the files needed to
8184 create the book in various forms are available from
8185 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">the
8186 github project page
</a
>.
</p
>
8188 <p
>The project got press coverage from the Norwegian IT news site
8189 digi.no. Check out the article
8190 "<a href=
"http://www.digi.no/juss_og_samfunn/
2015/
10/
29/vil-apne-politikernes-oyne-for-creative-commons
">Vil
8191 åpne politikernes øyne for Creative Commons
</a
>".
</li
>
8193 <p
>I
've
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture
">blogged
8194 about the project
</a
> as it moved along. The blogs document the translation
8195 progress and insights I had along the way.
</p
>
8200 <title>"Free Culture
" by @lessig - The background story for Creative Commons - new edition available
</title>
8201 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Free_Culture__by__lessig___The_background_story_for_Creative_Commons___new_edition_available.html
</link>
8202 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Free_Culture__by__lessig___The_background_story_for_Creative_Commons___new_edition_available.html
</guid>
8203 <pubDate>Fri,
23 Oct
2015 12:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8204 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-
22402863.html
">Click
8205 here to buy the book
</a
>.
</p
>
8207 <p
>In
2004, as the
<a href=
"https://creativecommons.org/
">Creative Commons
8208 movement
</a
> gained momentum, its creator Lawrence Lessig wrote the
8209 book
<a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)
">Free
8210 Culture
</a
> to explain the problems with increasing copyright
8211 regulation and suggest some solutions. I read the book back then and
8212 was very moved by it. Reading the book inspired me and changed the
8213 way I looked on copyright law, and I would love it if more people
8214 would read it too.
</p
>
8216 <p
>Because of this, I decided in the summer of
2012 to translate it to
8217 Norwegian Bokmål and publish it for those of my friends and family
8218 that prefer to read books in Norwegian. I translated the book using
8219 docbook and a gettext PO file, and a byproduct of this process is a
8220 new edition of the English original. I
've been in touch with the
8221 author during by work, and he said it was fine with him if I also
8222 published an English version. So I decided to do so. Today, I made
8224 <a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-
22402863.html
">available
8225 for sale on Lulu.com
</a
>, for those interested in a paper book. This
8228 <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
>
8230 <p
>The Norwegian Bokmål version will be available for purchase in a
8231 few days. I also plan to publish a French version in a few weeks or
8232 months, depending on the amount of people with knowledge of French to
8233 join the translation project. So far there is only one active
8234 person, but the French book is almost completely translated but
8235 need some proof reading.
</p
>
8237 <p
>The book is also available in PDF, ePub and MOBI formats from
8238 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">my
8239 github project page
</a
>. Note the ePub and MOBI versions have some
8240 formatting problems I believe is due to bugs in the docbook tool
8241 dbtoepub (Debian BTS issues
8242 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=
795842">#
795842</a
>
8244 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=
796871">#
796871</a
>),
8245 but I have not taken the time to investigate. I recommend the PDF and
8246 ePub version for now, as they seem to show up fine in the viewers I
8247 have available.
</p
>
8249 <p
>After the translation to Norwegian Bokmål was complete, I was able
8250 to secure some sponsoring from
8251 <a href=
"http://www.nuugfoundation.no/
">the NUUG Foundation
</a
> to
8252 print the book. This is the reason their logo is located on the back
8253 cover. I am very grateful for their contribution, and will use it to
8254 give a copy of the Norwegian edition to members of the Norwegian
8255 Parliament and other decision makers here in Norway.
</p
>
8260 <title>Lawrence Lessig interviewed Edward Snowden a year ago
</title>
8261 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lawrence_Lessig_interviewed_Edward_Snowden_a_year_ago.html
</link>
8262 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lawrence_Lessig_interviewed_Edward_Snowden_a_year_ago.html
</guid>
8263 <pubDate>Mon,
19 Oct
2015 11:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8264 <description><p
>Last year,
<a href=
"https://lessig2016.us/
">US president candidate
8265 in the Democratic Party
</a
> Lawrence interviewed Edward Snowden. The
8266 one hour interview was
8267 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Sr96TFQQE
">published by
8268 Harvard Law School
2014-
10-
23 on Youtube
</a
>, and the meeting took
8269 place
2014-
10-
20.
</p
>
8271 <p
>The questions are very good, and there is lots of useful
8272 information to be learned and very interesting issues to think about
8273 being raised. Please check it out.
</p
>
8275 <iframe width=
"560" height=
"315" src=
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/o_Sr96TFQQE
" frameborder=
"0" allowfullscreen
></iframe
>
8277 <p
>I find it especially interesting to hear again that Snowden did try
8278 to bring up his reservations through the official channels without any
8279 luck. It is in sharp contrast to the answers made
2013-
11-
06 by the
8280 Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg to the Norwegian Parliament,
8281 <a href=
"https://tale.holderdeord.no/speeches/s131106/
68">claiming
8282 Snowden is no Whistle-Blower
</a
> because he should have taken up his
8283 concerns internally and using official channels. It make me sad
8284 that this is the political leadership we have here in Norway.
</p
>
8289 <title>The Story of Aaron Swartz - Let us all weep!
</title>
8290 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Story_of_Aaron_Swartz___Let_us_all_weep_.html
</link>
8291 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Story_of_Aaron_Swartz___Let_us_all_weep_.html
</guid>
8292 <pubDate>Thu,
8 Oct
2015 12:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8293 <description><p
>The movie
"<a href=
"http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy
">The
8294 Internet
's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
</a
>" is both inspiring
8295 and depressing at the same time. The work of Aaron Swartz has
8296 inspired me in my work, and I am grateful of all the improvements he
8297 was able to initiate or complete. I wish I am able to do as much good
8298 in my life as he did in his. Every minute of this
1:
45 long movie is
8299 inspiring in documenting how much impact a single person can have on
8300 improving the society and this world. And it is depressing in
8301 documenting how the law enforcement of USA (and other countries) is
8302 corrupted to a point where they can push a bright kid to his death for
8303 downloading too many scientific articles. Aaron is dead. Let us all
8306 <p
>The movie is also available on
8307 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXr-
2hwTk58
">Youtube
</a
>. I
8308 wish there were Norwegian subtitles available, so I could show it to
8309 my parents.
</p
>
8314 <title>French Docbook/PDF/EPUB/MOBI edition of the Free Culture book
</title>
8315 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_Docbook_PDF_EPUB_MOBI_edition_of_the_Free_Culture_book.html
</link>
8316 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_Docbook_PDF_EPUB_MOBI_edition_of_the_Free_Culture_book.html
</guid>
8317 <pubDate>Thu,
1 Oct
2015 13:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8318 <description><p
>As I wrap up the Norwegian version of
8319 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">Free
8320 Culture
</a
> book by Lawrence Lessig (still waiting for my final proof
8321 reading copy to arrive in the mail), my great
8322 <a href=
"http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/
">dblatex
</a
> helper and
8323 developer of the dblatex docbook processor, Benoît Guillon, decided a
8324 to try to create a French version of the book. He started with the
8325 French translation available from the
8326 <a href=
"http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre
">Wikilivres wiki
8327 pages
</a
>, and wrote a program to convert it into a PO file, allowing
8328 the translation to be integrated into the po4a based framework I use
8329 to create the Norwegian translation from the English edition. We meet
8330 on the
<a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/%
23dblatex
">#dblatex IRC
8331 channel
</a
> to discuss the work. If you want to help create a French
8333 <a href=
"https://github.com/marsgui/free-culture-lessig
">his git
8334 repository
</a
> and join us on IRC. If the French edition look good,
8335 we might publish it as a paper book on lulu.com. A French version of
8336 the drawings and the cover need to be provided for this to happen.
</p
>
8341 <title>The life and death of a laptop battery
</title>
8342 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html
</link>
8343 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html
</guid>
8344 <pubDate>Thu,
24 Sep
2015 16:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8345 <description><p
>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
8346 But this do not last. The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
8347 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
8348 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
8349 all the time. Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
8350 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
8351 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.
</p
>
8353 <img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2015-
09-
24-laptop-battery-graph.png
"/
>
8355 <p
>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
8356 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
8357 by someone else. I found
8358 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats
">battery-stats
</a
>,
8359 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
8360 broken. I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
8361 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
8363 <a href=
"http://www.ifweassume.com/
2013/
08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
">a
8364 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air
</a
> I also
8366 <a href=
"https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git
">batlog
</a
>, not
8367 available in Debian.
</p
>
8369 <p
>I started my collector
2013-
07-
15, and it has been collecting
8370 battery stats ever since. Now my
8371 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around
115,
000
8372 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
8373 when it is unable to charge above
7% of original capacity. My
8374 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:
</p
>
8379 # http://www.ifweassume.com/
2013/
08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
8381 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/
2013/
01/
02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
8382 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
8384 files=
"manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
8385 energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status
"
8387 if [ ! -e
"$logfile
" ] ; then
8389 printf
"timestamp,
"
8391 printf
"%s,
" $f
8394 )
> "$logfile
"
8398 # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
8399 # when several log processes run in parallel.
8400 msg=$(printf
"%s,
" $(date +%s); \
8401 for f in $files; do \
8402 printf
"%s,
" $(cat $f); \
8404 echo
"$msg
"
8407 cd /sys/class/power_supply
8410 (cd $bat
&& log_battery
>> "$logfile
")
8414 <p
>The script is called when the power management system detect a
8415 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
8416 and out of hibernation and suspend. In addition, it collect a value
8417 every
10 minutes. This make it possible for me know when the battery
8418 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
8419 The code for the Debian package
8420 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status
">is now
8421 available on github
</a
>.
</p
>
8423 <p
>The collected log file look like this:
</p
>
8426 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
8427 1376591133,LGC,
45N1025,Li-ion,
974,
62800000,
62160000,
39050000,
0,Discharging,
8429 1443090528,LGC,
45N1025,Li-ion,
974,
4900000,
62160000,
4900000,
0,Full,
8430 1443090601,LGC,
45N1025,Li-ion,
974,
4900000,
62160000,
4900000,
0,Full,
8433 <p
>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
8434 over time. This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
8437 <p
>But why is this happening? Why are my laptop batteries always
8438 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
8439 satellites keep working year after year. If we are to believe
8440 <a href=
"http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries
">Battery
8441 University
</a
>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
8442 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to
100%
8443 all the time, but to stay below
90% of full charge most of the time.
8444 I
've been told that the Tesla electric cars
8445 <a href=
"http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit
">limit
8446 the charge of their batteries to
80%
</a
>, with the option to charge to
8447 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
8448 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
8449 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
8450 Linux too.
</p
>
8452 <p
>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
8453 stop charging at
80%, unless requested to charge to
100% once in
8454 preparation for a longer trip? I found
8455 <a href=
"http://askubuntu.com/questions/
34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-
80-capacity
">one
8456 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
8457 80%
</a
>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
8460 <p
>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than
100%
8461 at the start. I also wonder why the
"full capacity
" increases some
8462 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
8463 back to design capacity. And I wonder if the discharge and charge
8464 speed change over time, or if this stay the same. I did not yet try
8465 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
8466 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
8469 <p
>Update
2015-
09-
24: I got a tip to install the packages
8470 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
8471 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
8472 initially, and use
'tlp setcharge
40 80' to change when charging start
8473 and stop. I
've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
8474 and need to be replaced. The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
8480 <title>Book cover for the Free Culture book finally done
</title>
8481 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Book_cover_for_the_Free_Culture_book_finally_done.html
</link>
8482 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Book_cover_for_the_Free_Culture_book_finally_done.html
</guid>
8483 <pubDate>Thu,
3 Sep
2015 21:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8484 <description><p
>Creating a good looking book cover proved harder than I expected.
8485 I wanted to create a cover looking similar to the original cover of
8487 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">Free
8488 Culture
</a
> book we are translating to Norwegian, and I wanted it in
8489 vector format for high resolution printing. But my inkscape knowledge
8490 were not nearly good enough to pull that off.
8492 <p
>But thanks to the great inkscape community, I was able to wrap up
8493 the cover yesterday evening. I asked on the
8494 <a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/%
23inkscape
">#inkscape IRC channel
</a
>
8495 on Freenode for help and clues, and Marc Jeanmougin (Mc-) volunteered
8496 to try to recreate it based on the PDF of the cover from the HTML
8497 version. Not only did he create a
8498 <a href=
"https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/copy1.svg
">SVG document with
8499 the original and his vector version side by side
</a
>, he even provided
8500 an
<a href=
"https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/out-
1.ogv
">instruction
8501 video
</a
> explaining how he did it
</a
>. But the instruction video is
8502 not easy to follow for an untrained inkscape user. The video is a
8503 recording on how he did it, and he is obviously very experienced as
8504 the menu selections are very quick and he mentioned on IRC that he did
8505 use some keyboard shortcuts that can
't be seen on the video, but it
8506 give a good idea about the inkscape operations to use to create the
8507 stripes with the embossed copyright sign in the center.
</p
>
8509 <p
>I took his SVG file, copied the vector image and re-sized it to fit
8510 on the cover I was drawing. I am happy with the end result, and the
8511 current english version look like this:
</p
>
8513 <img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2015-
09-
03-free-culture-cover.png
" width=
"70%
" align=
"center
"/
>
8515 <p
>I am not quite sure about the text on the back, but guess it will
8516 do. I picked three quotes from the official site for the book, and
8517 hope it will work to trigger the interest of potential readers. The
8518 Norwegian cover will look the same, but with the texts and bar code
8519 replaced with the Norwegian version.
</p
>
8521 <p
>The book is very close to being ready for publication, and I expect
8522 to upload the final draft to Lulu in the next few days and order a
8523 final proof reading copy to verify that everything look like it should
8524 before allowing everyone to order their own copy of Free Culture, in
8525 English or Norwegian Bokmål. I
'm waiting to give the the productive
8526 proof readers a chance to complete their work.
</p
>
8531 <title>In my hand, a pocket book edition of the Norwegian Free Culture book!
</title>
8532 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/In_my_hand__a_pocket_book_edition_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_.html
</link>
8533 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/In_my_hand__a_pocket_book_edition_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_.html
</guid>
8534 <pubDate>Wed,
19 Aug
2015 22:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8535 <description><p
>Today, finally, my first printed draft edition of the Norwegian
8536 translation of Free Culture I have been working on for the last few
8537 years arrived in the mail. I had to fake a cover to get the interior
8538 printed, and the exterior of the book look awful, but that is
8539 irrelevant at this point. I asked for a printed pocket book version
8540 to get an idea about the font sizes and paper format as well as how
8541 good the figures and images look in print, but also to test what the
8542 pocket book version would look like. After receiving the
500 page
8543 pocket book, it became obvious to me that that pocket book size is too
8544 small for this book. I believe the book is too thick, and several
8545 tables and figures do not look good in the size they get with that
8546 small page sizes. I believe I will go with the
5.5x8.5 inch size
8547 instead. A surprise discovery from the paper version was how bad the
8548 URLs look in print. They are very hard to read in the colophon page.
8549 The URLs are red in the PDF, but light gray on paper. I need to
8550 change the color of links somehow to look better. But there is a
8551 printed book in my hand, and it feels great. :)
</p
>
8553 <p
>Now I only need to fix the cover, wrap up the postscript with the
8554 store behind the book, and collect the last corrections from the proof
8555 readers before the book is ready for proper printing. Cover artists
8556 willing to work for free and create a Creative Commons licensed vector
8557 file looking similar to the original is most welcome, as my skills as
8558 a graphics designer are mostly missing.
</p
>
8563 <title>First paper version of the Norwegian Free Culture book heading my way
</title>
8564 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_paper_version_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_heading_my_way.html
</link>
8565 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_paper_version_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_heading_my_way.html
</guid>
8566 <pubDate>Sun,
9 Aug
2015 10:
15:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8567 <description><p
>Typesetting a book is harder than I hoped. As the translation is
8568 mostly done, and a volunteer proof reader was going to check the text
8569 on paper, it was time this summer to focus on formatting my translated
8570 <a href=
"http://www.docbook.org/
">docbook
</a
> based version of the
8571 <a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
> book by Lawrence
8572 Lessig. I
've been trying to get both docboox-xsl+fop and dblatex to
8573 give me a good looking PDF, but in the end I went with dblatex, because
8574 its Debian maintainer and upstream developer were responsive and very
8575 helpful in solving my formatting challenges.
</p
>
8577 <p
>Last night, I finally managed to create a PDF that no longer made
8578 <a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/
">Lulu.com
</a
> complain after uploading,
8579 and I ordered a text version of the book on paper. It is lacking a
8580 proper book cover and is not tagged with the correct ISBN number, but
8581 should give me an idea what the finished book will look like.
</p
>
8583 <p
>Instead of using Lulu, I did consider printing the book using
8584 <a href=
"http://www.createspace.com/
">CreateSpace
</a
>, but ended up
8585 using Lulu because it had smaller book size options (CreateSpace seem
8586 to lack pocket book with extended distribution). I looked for a
8587 similar service in Norway, but have not seen anything so far. Please
8588 let me know if I am missing out on something here.
</p
>
8590 <p
>But I still struggle to decide the book size. Should I go for
8591 pocket book (
4.25x6.875 inches /
10.8x17.5 cm) with
556 pages, Digest
8592 (
5.5x8.5 inches /
14x21.6 cm) with
323 pages or US Trade (
6x8 inches /
8593 15.3x22.9 cm) with
280 pages? Fewer pager give a cheaper book, and a
8594 smaller book is easier to carry around. The test book I ordered was
8595 pocket book sized, to give me an idea how well that fit in my hand,
8596 but I suspect I will end up using a digest sized book in the end to
8597 bring the prize down further.
</p
>
8599 <p
>My biggest challenge at the moment is making nice cover art. My
8600 inkscape skills are not yet up to the task of replicating the original
8601 cover in SVG format. I also need to figure out what to write about
8602 the book on the back (will most likely use the same text as the
8603 description on web based book stores). I would love help with this,
8604 if you are willing to license the art source and final version using
8605 the same CC license as the book. My artistic skills are not really up
8606 to the task.
</p
>
8608 <p
>I plan to publish the book in both English and Norwegian and on
8609 paper, in PDF form as well as EPUB and MOBI format. The current
8610 status can as usual be found on
8611 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>
8612 in the archive/ directory. So far I have spent all time on making the
8613 PDF version look good. Someone should probably do the same with the
8614 dbtoepub generated e-book. Help is definitely needed here, as I
8615 expect to run out of steem before I find time to improve the epub
8616 formatting.
</p
>
8618 <p
>Please let me know via github if you find typos in the book or
8619 discover translations that should be improved. The final proof
8620 reading is being done right now, and I expect to publish the finished
8621 result in a few months.
</p
>
8626 <title>Typesetting DocBook footnotes as endnotes with dblatex
</title>
8627 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_DocBook_footnotes_as_endnotes_with_dblatex.html
</link>
8628 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_DocBook_footnotes_as_endnotes_with_dblatex.html
</guid>
8629 <pubDate>Thu,
16 Jul
2015 18:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8630 <description><p
>I
'm still working on the Norwegian version of the
8631 <a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture book by Lawrence
8632 Lessig
</a
>, and is now working on the final typesetting and layout.
8633 One of the features I want to get the structure similar to the
8634 original book is to typeset the footnotes as endnotes in the notes
8635 chapter. Based on the
8636 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
685063">feedback from the Debian
8637 maintainer and the dblatex developer
</a
>, I came up with this recipe I
8638 would like to share with you. The proposal was to create a new LaTeX
8639 class file and add the LaTeX code there, but this is not always
8640 practical, when I want to be able to replace the class using a make
8641 file variable. So my proposal misuses the latex.begindocument XSL
8642 parameter value, to get a small fragment into the correct location in
8643 the generated LaTeX File.
</p
>
8645 <p
>First, decide where in the DocBook document to place the endnotes,
8646 and add this text there:
</p
>
8649 &lt;?latex \theendnotes ?
&gt;
8652 <p
>Next, create a xsl stylesheet file dblatex-endnotes.xsl to add the
8653 code needed to add the endnote instructions in the preamble of the
8654 generated LaTeX document, with content like this:
</p
>
8657 &lt;?xml version=
'1.0'?
&gt;
8658 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl=
"http://www.w3.org/
1999/XSL/Transform
" version=
'1.0'&gt;
8659 &lt;xsl:param name=
"latex.begindocument
"&gt;
8660 &lt;xsl:text
&gt;
8661 \usepackage{endnotes}
8662 \let\footnote=\endnote
8663 \def\enoteheading{\mbox{}\par\vskip-\baselineskip }
8665 &lt;/xsl:text
&gt;
8666 &lt;/xsl:param
&gt;
8667 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet
&gt;
8670 <p
>Finally, load this xsl file when running dblatex, for example like
8674 dblatex --xsl-user=dblatex-endnotes.xsl freeculture.nb.xml
8677 <p
>The end result can be seen on github, where
8678 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">my
8679 book project
</a
> is located.
</p
>
8684 <title>MPEG LA on
"Internet Broadcast AVC Video
" licensing and non-private use
</title>
8685 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MPEG_LA_on__Internet_Broadcast_AVC_Video__licensing_and_non_private_use.html
</link>
8686 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MPEG_LA_on__Internet_Broadcast_AVC_Video__licensing_and_non_private_use.html
</guid>
8687 <pubDate>Tue,
7 Jul
2015 09:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8688 <description><p
>After asking the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK)
8689 <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
8690 they can broadcast and stream H
.264 video without an agreement with
8691 the MPEG LA
</a
>, I was wiser, but still confused. So I asked MPEG LA
8692 if their understanding matched that of NRK. As far as I can tell, it
8695 <p
>I started by asking for more information about the various
8696 licensing classes and what exactly is covered by the
"Internet
8697 Broadcast AVC Video
" class that NRK pointed me at to explain why NRK
8698 did not need a license for streaming H
.264 video:
8700 <p
><blockquote
>
8702 <p
>According to
8703 <a href=
"http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%
20LA%
20News%
20List/Attachments/
226/n-
10-
02-
02.pdf
">a
8704 MPEG LA press release dated
2010-
02-
02</a
>, there is no charge when
8705 using MPEG AVC/H
.264 according to the terms of
"Internet Broadcast AVC
8706 Video
". I am trying to understand exactly what the terms of
"Internet
8707 Broadcast AVC Video
" is, and wondered if you could help me. What
8708 exactly is covered by these terms, and what is not?
</p
>
8710 <p
>The only source of more information I have been able to find is a
8712 <a href=
"http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcweb.pdf
">AVC
8713 Patent Portfolio License Briefing
</a
>, which states this about the
8717 <li
>Where End User pays for AVC Video
8719 <li
>Subscription (not limited by title) –
100,
000 or fewer
8720 subscribers/yr = no royalty;
&gt;
100,
000 to
250,
000 subscribers/yr =
8721 $
25,
000;
&gt;
250,
000 to
500,
000 subscribers/yr = $
50,
000;
&gt;
500,
000 to
8722 1M subscribers/yr = $
75,
000;
&gt;
1M subscribers/yr = $
100,
000</li
>
8724 <li
>Title-by-Title -
12 minutes or less = no royalty;
&gt;
12 minutes in
8725 length = lower of (a)
2% or (b) $
0.02 per title
</li
>
8726 </ul
></li
>
8728 <li
>Where remuneration is from other sources
8730 <li
>Free Television - (a) one-time $
2,
500 per transmission encoder or
8731 (b) annual fee starting at $
2,
500 for
&gt;
100,
000 HH rising to
8732 maximum $
10,
000 for
&gt;
1,
000,
000 HH
</li
>
8734 <li
>Internet Broadcast AVC Video (not title-by-title, not subscription)
8735 – no royalty for life of the AVC Patent Portfolio License
</li
>
8736 </ul
></li
>
8739 <p
>Am I correct in assuming that the four categories listed is the
8740 categories used when selecting licensing terms, and that
"Internet
8741 Broadcast AVC Video
" is the category for things that do not fall into
8742 one of the other three categories? Can you point me to a good source
8743 explaining what is ment by
"title-by-title
" and
"Free Television
" in
8744 the license terms for AVC/H
.264?
</p
>
8746 <p
>Will a web service providing H
.264 encoded video content in a
8747 "video on demand
" fashing similar to Youtube and Vimeo, where no
8748 subscription is required and no payment is required from end users to
8749 get access to the videos, fall under the terms of the
"Internet
8750 Broadcast AVC Video
", ie no royalty for life of the AVC Patent
8751 Portfolio license? Does it matter if some users are subscribed to get
8752 access to personalized services?
</p
>
8754 <p
>Note, this request and all answers will be published on the
8756 </blockquote
></p
>
8758 <p
>The answer came quickly from Benjamin J. Myers, Licensing Associate
8759 with the MPEG LA:
</p
>
8761 <p
><blockquote
>
8762 <p
>Thank you for your message and for your interest in MPEG LA. We
8763 appreciate hearing from you and I will be happy to assist you.
</p
>
8765 <p
>As you are aware, MPEG LA offers our AVC Patent Portfolio License
8766 which provides coverage under patents that are essential for use of
8767 the AVC/H
.264 Standard (MPEG-
4 Part
10). Specifically, coverage is
8768 provided for end products and video content that make use of AVC/H
.264
8769 technology. Accordingly, the party offering such end products and
8770 video to End Users concludes the AVC License and is responsible for
8771 paying the applicable royalties.
</p
>
8773 <p
>Regarding Internet Broadcast AVC Video, the AVC License generally
8774 defines such content to be video that is distributed to End Users over
8775 the Internet free-of-charge. Therefore, if a party offers a service
8776 which allows users to upload AVC/H
.264 video to its website, and such
8777 AVC Video is delivered to End Users for free, then such video would
8778 receive coverage under the sublicense for Internet Broadcast AVC
8779 Video, which is not subject to any royalties for the life of the AVC
8780 License. This would also apply in the scenario where a user creates a
8781 free online account in order to receive a customized offering of free
8782 AVC Video content. In other words, as long as the End User is given
8783 access to or views AVC Video content at no cost to the End User, then
8784 no royalties would be payable under our AVC License.
</p
>
8786 <p
>On the other hand, if End Users pay for access to AVC Video for a
8787 specific period of time (e.g., one month, one year, etc.), then such
8788 video would constitute Subscription AVC Video. In cases where AVC
8789 Video is delivered to End Users on a pay-per-view basis, then such
8790 content would constitute Title-by-Title AVC Video. If a party offers
8791 Subscription or Title-by-Title AVC Video to End Users, then they would
8792 be responsible for paying the applicable royalties you noted below.
</p
>
8794 <p
>Finally, in the case where AVC Video is distributed for free
8795 through an
"over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission
", then
8796 such content would constitute Free Television AVC Video and would be
8797 subject to the applicable royalties.
</p
>
8799 <p
>For your reference, I have attached
8800 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2015-
07-
07-mpegla.pdf
">a
8801 .pdf copy of the AVC License
</a
>. You will find the relevant
8802 sublicense information regarding AVC Video in Sections
2.2 through
8803 2.5, and the corresponding royalties in Section
3.1.2 through
3.1.4.
8804 You will also find the definitions of Title-by-Title AVC Video,
8805 Subscription AVC Video, Free Television AVC Video, and Internet
8806 Broadcast AVC Video in Section
1 of the License. Please note that the
8807 electronic copy is provided for informational purposes only and cannot
8808 be used for execution.
</p
>
8810 <p
>I hope the above information is helpful. If you have additional
8811 questions or need further assistance with the AVC License, please feel
8812 free to contact me directly.
</p
>
8813 </blockquote
></p
>
8815 <p
>Having a fresh copy of the license text was useful, and knowing
8816 that the definition of Title-by-Title required payment per title made
8817 me aware that my earlier understanding of that phrase had been wrong.
8818 But I still had a few questions:
</p
>
8820 <p
><blockquote
>
8821 <p
>I have a small followup question. Would it be possible for me to get
8822 a license with MPEG LA even if there are no royalties to be paid? The
8823 reason I ask, is that some video related products have a copyright
8824 clause limiting their use without a license with MPEG LA. The clauses
8825 typically look similar to this:
8827 <p
><blockquote
>
8828 This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
8829 the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer to (a) encode
8830 video in compliance with the AVC standard (
"AVC video
") and/or (b)
8831 decode AVC video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a
8832 personal and non-commercial activity and/or AVC video that was
8833 obtained from a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No
8834 license is granted or shall be implied for any other use. additional
8835 information may be obtained from MPEG LA L.L.C.
8836 </blockquote
></p
>
8838 <p
>It is unclear to me if this clause mean that I need to enter into
8839 an agreement with MPEG LA to use the product in question, even if
8840 there are no royalties to be paid to MPEG LA. I suspect it will
8841 differ depending on the jurisdiction, and mine is Norway. What is
8842 MPEG LAs view on this?
</p
>
8843 </blockquote
></p
>
8845 <p
>According to the answer, MPEG LA believe those using such tools for
8846 non-personal or commercial use need a license with them:
</p
>
8848 <p
><blockquote
>
8850 <p
>With regard to the Notice to Customers, I would like to begin by
8851 clarifying that the Notice from Section
7.1 of the AVC License
8854 <p
>THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR
8855 THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT
8856 RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC
8857 STANDARD (
"AVC VIDEO
") AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED
8858 BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM
8859 A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED
8860 OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE
8861 OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM
</p
>
8863 <p
>The Notice to Customers is intended to inform End Users of the
8864 personal usage rights (for example, to watch video content) included
8865 with the product they purchased, and to encourage any party using the
8866 product for commercial purposes to contact MPEG LA in order to become
8867 licensed for such use (for example, when they use an AVC Product to
8868 deliver Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free Television or Internet
8869 Broadcast AVC Video to End Users, or to re-Sell a third party
's AVC
8870 Product as their own branded AVC Product).
</p
>
8872 <p
>Therefore, if a party is to be licensed for its use of an AVC
8873 Product to Sell AVC Video on a Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free
8874 Television or Internet Broadcast basis, that party would need to
8875 conclude the AVC License, even in the case where no royalties were
8876 payable under the License. On the other hand, if that party (either a
8877 Consumer or business customer) simply uses an AVC Product for their
8878 own internal purposes and not for the commercial purposes referenced
8879 above, then such use would be included in the royalty paid for the AVC
8880 Products by the licensed supplier.
</p
>
8882 <p
>Finally, I note that our AVC License provides worldwide coverage in
8883 countries that have AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, including
8886 <p
>I hope this clarification is helpful. If I may be of any further
8887 assistance, just let me know.
</p
>
8888 </blockquote
></p
>
8890 <p
>The mentioning of Norwegian patents made me a bit confused, so I
8891 asked for more information:
</p
>
8893 <p
><blockquote
>
8895 <p
>But one minor question at the end. If I understand you correctly,
8896 you state in the quote above that there are patents in the AVC Patent
8897 Portfolio that are valid in Norway. This make me believe I read the
8898 list available from
&lt;URL:
8899 <a href=
"http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx
">http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx
</a
>
8900 &gt; incorrectly, as I believed the
"NO
" prefix in front of patents
8901 were Norwegian patents, and the only one I could find under Mitsubishi
8902 Electric Corporation expired in
2012. Which patents are you referring
8903 to that are relevant for Norway?
</p
>
8905 </blockquote
></p
>
8907 <p
>Again, the quick answer explained how to read the list of patents
8908 in that list:
</p
>
8910 <p
><blockquote
>
8912 <p
>Your understanding is correct that the last AVC Patent Portfolio
8913 Patent in Norway expired on
21 October
2012. Therefore, where AVC
8914 Video is both made and Sold in Norway after that date, then no
8915 royalties would be payable for such AVC Video under the AVC License.
8916 With that said, our AVC License provides historic coverage for AVC
8917 Products and AVC Video that may have been manufactured or Sold before
8918 the last Norwegian AVC patent expired. I would also like to clarify
8919 that coverage is provided for the country of manufacture and the
8920 country of Sale that has active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents.
</p
>
8922 <p
>Therefore, if a party offers AVC Products or AVC Video for Sale in
8923 a country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents (for example,
8924 Sweden, Denmark, Finland, etc.), then that party would still need
8925 coverage under the AVC License even if such products or video are
8926 initially made in a country without active AVC Patent Portfolio
8927 Patents (for example, Norway). Similarly, a party would need to
8928 conclude the AVC License if they make AVC Products or AVC Video in a
8929 country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, but eventually Sell
8930 such AVC Products or AVC Video in a country without active AVC Patent
8931 Portfolio Patents.
</p
>
8932 </blockquote
></p
>
8934 <p
>As far as I understand it, MPEG LA believe anyone using Adobe
8935 Premiere and other video related software with a H
.264 distribution
8936 license need a license agreement with MPEG LA to use such tools for
8937 anything non-private or commercial, while it is OK to set up a
8938 Youtube-like service as long as no-one pays to get access to the
8939 content. I still have no clear idea how this applies to Norway, where
8940 none of the patents MPEG LA is licensing are valid. Will the
8941 copyright terms take precedence or can those terms be ignored because
8942 the patents are not valid in Norway?
</p
>
8947 <title>New laptop - some more clues and ideas based on feedback
</title>
8948 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_laptop___some_more_clues_and_ideas_based_on_feedback.html
</link>
8949 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_laptop___some_more_clues_and_ideas_based_on_feedback.html
</guid>
8950 <pubDate>Sun,
5 Jul
2015 21:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8951 <description><p
>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
8952 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback. I wish to
8953 thank every one of these. Several pointed me to the possibility of
8954 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
8955 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
8956 machine. But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
8957 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
8958 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement. If I did
8959 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
8960 using
<a href=
"http://www.francecrans.com/
">FrancEcrans
</a
>, but it
8961 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.
</p
>
8963 <p
>One tip I got was to use the
8964 <a href=
"https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb
">Skinflint
</a
> web service to
8965 compare laptop models. It seem to have more models available than
8966 prisjakt.no. Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
8967 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook
840 keyboard is not
8968 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
8969 keyboards I tested. Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
8971 <p
>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
8972 newest Thinkpad X model. The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
8973 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
8974 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
8975 <a href=
"http://www.corsac.net/X250/
">Corsac.net
</a
>. The reports I
8976 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent. Some say the keyboard
8977 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
8978 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
8979 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
8980 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
8981 replace it. I
'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
8982 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230. I
'm
8983 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
8984 noisy. In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
8985 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.
</p
>
8987 <p
>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
8988 <a href=
"http://pro-star.com
">Pro-Star
</a
>, another was
8989 <a href=
"http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/
">Libreboot
</a
>.
8990 The latter look very attractive to me.
</p
>
8992 <p
>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback. It help a lot
8993 as I keep looking for a replacement.
</p
>
8995 <p
>Update
2015-
07-
06: I was recommended to check out the
8996 <a href=
"">lapstore.de
</a
> web shop for used laptops. They got several
8998 <a href=
"http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/
411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/
">old
8999 thinkpad X models
</a
>, and provide one year warranty.
</p
>
9004 <title>Time to find a new laptop, as the old one is broken after only two years
</title>
9005 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_find_a_new_laptop__as_the_old_one_is_broken_after_only_two_years.html
</link>
9006 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_find_a_new_laptop__as_the_old_one_is_broken_after_only_two_years.html
</guid>
9007 <pubDate>Fri,
3 Jul
2015 07:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9008 <description><p
>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
9009 replacement soon. The left
5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
9010 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
9011 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
9012 flickering.
</p
>
9014 <p
>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
9016 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html
">I
9017 described them in
2013</a
>. The last time I bought a laptop, I had
9019 <a href=
"http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=
353">prisjakt.no
</a
>
9020 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
9021 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually. Three button mouse
9022 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
9023 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook
820 G1 and
9024 G2) lack three mouse buttons). It is also unclear to me how good the
9025 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are. I hope Lenovo have not messed up
9026 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
9027 deteriorated since X41.
</p
>
9029 <p
>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
9030 seem sensible to me? Are there better services around to search the
9031 set of available laptops for features? Please send me an email if you
9032 have suggestions.
</p
>
9034 <p
>Update
2015-
07-
23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
9035 <a href=
"http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom
">list
9036 of endorsed hardware
</a
>, which is useful background information.
</p
>
9041 <title>MakerCon Nordic videos now available on Frikanalen
</title>
9042 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MakerCon_Nordic_videos_now_available_on_Frikanalen.html
</link>
9043 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MakerCon_Nordic_videos_now_available_on_Frikanalen.html
</guid>
9044 <pubDate>Thu,
2 Jul
2015 14:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9045 <description><p
>Last oktober I was involved on behalf of
9046 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">NUUG
</a
> with recording the talks at
9047 <a href=
"http://www.makercon.no/
">MakerCon Nordic
</a
>, a conference for
9048 the Maker movement. Since then it has been the plan to publish the
9049 recordings on
<a href=
"http://www.frikanalen.no/
">Frikanalen
</a
>, which
9050 finally happened the last few days. A few talks are missing because
9051 the speakers asked the organizers to not publish them, but most of the
9052 talks are available. The talks are being broadcasted on RiksTV
9053 channel
50 and using multicast on Uninett, as well as being available
9054 from the Frikanalen web site. The unedited recordings are
9055 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/
">available on
9056 Youtube too
</a
>.
</p
>
9058 <p
>This is the list of talks available at the moment. Visit the
9059 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/?q=makercon
">Frikanalen video
9060 pages
</a
> to view them.
</p
>
9064 <li
>Evolutionary algorithms as a design tool - from art
9065 to robotics (Kyrre Glette)
</li
>
9067 <li
>Make and break (Hans Gerhard Meier)
</li
>
9069 <li
>Making a one year school course for young makers
9070 (Olav Helland)
</li
>
9072 <li
>Innovation Inspiration - IPR Databases as a Source of
9073 Inspiration (Hege Langlo)
</li
>
9075 <li
>Making a toy for makers (Erik Torstensson)
</li
>
9077 <li
>How to make
3D printer electronics (Elias Bakken)
</li
>
9079 <li
>Hovering Clouds: Looking at online tool offerings for Product
9080 Design and
3D Printing (William Kempton)
</li
>
9082 <li
>Travelling maker stories (Øyvind Nydal Dahl)
</li
>
9084 <li
>Making the first Maker Faire in Sweden (Nils Olander)
</li
>
9086 <li
>Breaking the mold: Printing
1000’s of parts (Espen Sivertsen)
</li
>
9088 <li
>Ultimaker — and open source
3D printing (Erik de Bruijn)
</li
>
9090 <li
>Autodesk’s
3D Printing Platform: Sparking innovation (Hilde
9093 <li
>How Making is Changing the World – and How You Can Too!
9094 (Jennifer Turliuk)
</li
>
9096 <li
>Open-Source Adventuring: OpenROV, OpenExplorer and the Future of
9097 Connected Exploration (David Lang)
</li
>
9099 <li
>Making in Norway (Haakon Karlsen Jr., Graham Hayward and Jens
9102 <li
>The Impact of the Maker Movement (Mike Senese)
</li
>
9106 <p
>Part of the reason this took so long was that the scripts NUUG had
9107 to prepare a recording for publication were five years old and no
9108 longer worked with the current video processing tools (command line
9109 argument changes). In addition, we needed better audio normalization,
9110 which sent me on a detour to
9111 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html
">package
9112 bs1770gain for Debian
</a
>. Now this is in place and it became a lot
9113 easier to publish NUUG videos on Frikanalen.
</p
>
9118 <title>Graphing the Norwegian company ownership structure
</title>
9119 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Graphing_the_Norwegian_company_ownership_structure.html
</link>
9120 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Graphing_the_Norwegian_company_ownership_structure.html
</guid>
9121 <pubDate>Mon,
15 Jun
2015 14:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9122 <description><p
>It is a bit work to figure out the ownership structure of companies
9123 in Norway. The information is publicly available, but one need to
9124 recursively look up ownership for all owners to figure out the complete
9125 ownership graph of a given set of companies. To save me the work in
9126 the future, I wrote a script to do this automatically, outputting the
9127 ownership structure using the Graphviz/dotty format. The data source
9128 is web scraping from
<a href=
"http://www.proff.no/
">Proff
</a
>, because
9129 I failed to find a useful source directly from the official keepers of
9130 the ownership data,
<a href=
"http://www.brreg.no/
">Brønnøysundsregistrene
</a
>.
</p
>
9132 <p
>To get an ownership graph for a set of companies, fetch
9133 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/brreg-norway-ownership-graph
">the code from git
</a
> and run it using the organisation number. I
'm
9134 using the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet as an example here, as its
9135 ownership structure is very simple:
</p
>
9138 % time ./bin/eierskap-dotty
958033540 > dagbladet.dot
9146 <p
>The script accept several organisation numbers on the command line,
9147 allowing a cluster of companies to be graphed in the same image. The
9148 resulting dot file for the example above look like this. The edges
9149 are labeled with the ownership percentage, and the nodes uses the
9150 organisation number as their name and the name as the label:
</p
>
9155 "Aller Holding A/s
" -
> "910119877" [label=
"100%
"]
9156 "910119877" -
> "998689015" [label=
"100%
"]
9157 "998689015" -
> "958033540" [label=
"99%
"]
9158 "974530600" -
> "958033540" [label=
"1%
"]
9159 "958033540" [label=
"AS DAGBLADET
"]
9160 "998689015" [label=
"Berner Media Holding AS
"]
9161 "974530600" [label=
"Dagbladets Stiftelse
"]
9162 "910119877" [label=
"Aller Media AS
"]
9166 <p
>To view the ownership graph, run
"<tt
>dotty dagbladet.dot
</tt
>" or
9167 convert it to a PNG using
"<tt
>dot -T png dagbladet.dot
>
9168 dagbladet.png
</tt
>". The result can be seen below:
</p
>
9170 <img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2015-
06-
15-ownership-graphs-norway-dagbladet.png
" width=
"80%
">
9172 <p
>Note that I suspect the
"Aller Holding A/S
" entry to be incorrect
9173 data in the official ownership register, as that name is not
9174 registered in the official company register for Norway. The ownership
9175 register is sensitive to typos and there seem to be no strict checking
9176 of the ownership links.
</p
>
9178 <p
>Let me know if you improve the script or find better data sources.
9179 The code is licensed according to GPL
2 or newer.
</p
>
9181 <p
>Update
2015-
06-
15: Since the initial post I
've been told that
9182 "<a href=
"http://www.proff.dk/firma/carl-allers-etablissement-aktieselskab/københavn-v/hovedkontorer/
13624518-
3/
">Aller
9183 Holding A/S
</a
>" is a Danish company, which explain why it did not
9184 have a Norwegian organisation number. I
've also been told that there
9185 is a
<a href=
"http://www.brreg.no/automatiske/webservices/
">web
9186 services API available
</a
> from Brønnøysundsregistrene, for those
9187 willing to accept the terms or pay the price.
</p
>
9192 <title>Measuring and adjusting the loudness of a TV channel using bs1770gain
</title>
9193 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html
</link>
9194 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html
</guid>
9195 <pubDate>Thu,
11 Jun
2015 13:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9196 <description><p
>Television loudness is the source of frustration for viewers
9197 everywhere. Some channels are very load, others are less loud, and
9198 ads tend to shout very high to get the attention of the viewers, and
9199 the viewers do not like this. This fact is well known to the TV
9200 channels. See for example the BBC white paper
9201 "<a href=
"http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp-pdf-files/WHP202.pdf
">Terminology
9202 for loudness and level dBTP, LU, and all that
</a
>" from
2011 for a
9203 summary of the problem domain. To better address the need for even
9204 loadness, the TV channels got together several years ago to agree on a
9205 new way to measure loudness in digital files as one step in
9206 standardizing loudness. From this came the ITU-R standard BS
.1770,
9207 "<a href=
"http://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-BS
.1770/en
">Algorithms to
9208 measure audio programme loudness and true-peak audio level
</a
>".
</p
>
9210 <p
>The ITU-R BS
.1770 specification describe an algorithm to measure
9211 loadness in LUFS (Loudness Units, referenced to Full Scale). But
9212 having a way to measure is not enough. To get the same loudness
9213 across TV channels, one also need to decide which value to standardize
9214 on. For European TV channels, this was done in the EBU Recommondaton
9215 R128,
"<a href=
"https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf
">Loudness
9216 normalisation and permitted maximum level of audio signals
</a
>", which
9217 specifies a recommended level of -
23 LUFS. In Norway, I have been
9218 told that NRK, TV2, MTG and SBS have decided among themselves to
9219 follow the R128 recommondation for playout from
2016-
03-
01.
</p
>
9221 <p
>There are free software available to measure and adjust the loudness
9222 level using the LUFS. In Debian, I am aware of a library named
9223 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libebur128
">libebur128
</a
>
9224 able to measure the loudness and since yesterday morning a new binary
9225 named
<a href=
"http://bs1770gain.sourceforge.net
">bs1770gain
</a
>
9226 capable of both measuring and adjusting was uploaded and is waiting
9227 for NEW processing. I plan to maintain the latter in Debian under the
9228 <a href=
"https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=pkg-multimedia-maintainers%
40lists.alioth.debian.org
">Debian
9229 multimedia
</a
> umbrella.
</p
>
9231 <p
>The free software based TV channel I am involved in,
9232 <a href=
"http://www.frikanalen.no/
">Frikanalen
</a
>, plan to follow the
9233 R128 recommondation ourself as soon as we can adjust the software to
9234 do so, and the bs1770gain tool seem like a good fit for that part of
9235 the puzzle to measure loudness on new video uploaded to Frikanalen.
9236 Personally, I plan to use bs1770gain to adjust the loudness of videos
9237 I upload to Frikanalen on behalf of
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">the
9238 NUUG member organisation
</a
>. The program seem to be able to measure
9239 the LUFS value of any media file handled by ffmpeg, but I
've only
9240 successfully adjusted the LUFS value of WAV files. I suspect it
9241 should be able to adjust it for all the formats handled by ffmpeg.
</p
>
9246 <title>Norwegian citizens now required by law to give their fingerprint to the police
</title>
9247 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_citizens_now_required_by_law_to_give_their_fingerprint_to_the_police.html
</link>
9248 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_citizens_now_required_by_law_to_give_their_fingerprint_to_the_police.html
</guid>
9249 <pubDate>Sun,
10 May
2015 16:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9250 <description><p
>5 days ago, the Norwegian Parliament decided, unanimously, that all
9251 citizens of Norway, no matter if they are suspected of something
9252 criminal or not, are
9253 <a href=
"https://www.holderdeord.no/votes/
1430838871e
">required to
9254 give fingerprints to the police
</a
> (vote details from Holder de
9255 ord). The law make it sound like it will be optional, but in a few
9256 years there will be no option any more. The ID will be required to
9257 vote, to get a bank account, a bank card, to change address on the
9258 post office, to receive an electronic ID or to get a drivers license
9259 and many other tasks required to function in Norway. The banks plan
9260 to stop providing their own ID on the bank cards when this new
9261 national ID is introduced, and the national road authorities plan to
9262 change the drivers license to no longer be usable as identity cards.
9263 In effect, to function as a citizen in Norway a national ID card will
9264 be required, and to get it one need to provide the fingerprints to
9265 the police.
</p
>
9267 <p
>In addition to handing the fingerprint to the police (which
9268 promised to not make a copy of the fingerprint image at that point in
9269 time, but say nothing about doing it later), a picture of the
9270 fingerprint will be stored on the RFID chip, along with a picture of
9271 the face and other information about the person. Some of the
9272 information will be encrypted, but the encryption will be the same
9273 system as currently used in the passports. The codes to decrypt will
9274 be available to a lot of government offices and their suppliers around
9275 the globe, but for those that do not know anyone in those circles it
9276 is good to know that
9277 <a href=
"http://www.theguardian.com/technology/
2006/nov/
17/news.homeaffairs
">the
9278 encryption is already broken
</a
>. And they
9279 <a href=
"http://www.networkworld.com/article/
2215057/wireless/bad-guys-could-read-rfid-passports-at-
217-feet--maybe-a-lot-more.html
">can
9280 be read from
70 meters away
</a
>. This can be mitigated a bit by
9281 keeping it in a Faraday cage (metal box or metal wire container), but
9282 one will be required to take it out of there often enough to expose
9283 ones private and personal information to a lot of people that have no
9284 business getting access to that information.
</p
>
9286 <p
>The new Norwegian national IDs are a vehicle for identity theft,
9287 and I feel sorry for us all having politicians accepting such invasion
9288 of privacy without any objections. So are the Norwegian passports,
9289 but it has been possible to function in Norway without those so far.
9290 That option is going away with the passing of the new law. In this, I
9291 envy the Germans, because for them it is optional how much biometric
9292 information is stored in their national ID.
</p
>
9294 <p
>And if forced collection of fingerprints was not bad enough, the
9295 information collected in the national ID card register can be handed
9296 over to foreign intelligence services and police authorities,
"when
9297 extradition is not considered disproportionate
".
</p
>
9299 <p
>Update
2015-
05-
12: For those unable to believe that the Parliament
9300 really could make such decision, I wrote
9301 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Blir_det_virkelig_krav_om_fingeravtrykk_i_nasjonale_ID_kort_.html
">a
9302 summary of the sources I have
</a
> for concluding the way I do
9303 (Norwegian Only, as the sources are all in Norwegian).
</p
>
9308 <title>What would it cost to store all phone calls in Norway?
</title>
9309 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_would_it_cost_to_store_all_phone_calls_in_Norway_.html
</link>
9310 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_would_it_cost_to_store_all_phone_calls_in_Norway_.html
</guid>
9311 <pubDate>Fri,
1 May
2015 19:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9312 <description><p
>Many years ago, a friend of mine calculated how much it would cost
9313 to store the sound of all phone calls in Norway, and came up with the
9314 cost of around
20 million NOK (
2.4 mill EUR) for all the calls in a
9315 year. I got curious and wondered what the same calculation would look
9316 like today. To do so one need an idea of how much data storage is
9317 needed for each minute of sound, how many minutes all the calls in
9318 Norway sums up to, and the cost of data storage.
</p
>
9320 <p
>The
2005 numbers are from
9321 <a href=
"http://www.digi.no/analyser/
2005/
10/
04/vi-prater-stadig-mindre-i-roret
">digi.no
</a
>,
9322 the
2012 numbers are from
9323 <a href=
"http://www.nkom.no/aktuelt/nyheter/fortsatt-vekst-i-det-norske-ekommarkedet
">a
9324 NKOM report
</a
>, and I got the
2013 numbers after asking NKOM via
9325 email. I was told the numbers for
2014 will be presented May
20th,
9326 and decided not to wait for those, as I doubt they will be very
9327 different from the numbers from
2013.
</p
>
9329 <p
>The amount of data storage per minute sound depend on the wanted
9330 quality, and for phone calls it is generally believed that
8 Kbit/s is
9331 enough. See for example a
9332 <a href=
"http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice-quality/
7934-bwidth-consume.html#topic1
">summary
9333 on voice quality from Cisco
</a
> for some alternatives.
8 Kbit/s is
60
9334 Kbytes/min, and this can be multiplied with the number of call minutes
9335 to get the storage requirements.
</p
>
9337 <p
>Storage prices varies a lot, depending on speed, backup strategies,
9338 availability requirements etc. But a simple way to calculate can be
9339 to use the price of a TiB-disk (around
1000 NOK /
120 EUR) and double
9340 it to take space, power and redundancy into account. It could be much
9341 higher with high speed and good redundancy requirements.
</p
>
9343 <p
>But back to the question, What would it cost to store all phone
9344 calls in Norway? Not much. Here is a small table showing the
9345 estimated cost, which is within the budget constraint of most medium
9346 and large organisations:
</p
>
9348 <table border=
"1">
9349 <tr
><th
>Year
</th
><th
>Call minutes
</th
><th
>Size
</th
><th
>Price in NOK / EUR
</th
></tr
>
9350 <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
>
9351 <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
>
9352 <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
>
9355 <p
>This is the cost of buying the storage. Maintenance need to be
9356 taken into account too, but calculating that is left as an exercise
9357 for the reader. But it is obvious to me from those numbers that
9358 recording the sound of all phone calls in Norway is not going to be
9359 stopped because it is too expensive. I wonder if someone already is
9360 collecting the data?
</p
>
9365 <title>First Jessie based Debian Edu beta release
</title>
9366 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_beta_release.html
</link>
9367 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_beta_release.html
</guid>
9368 <pubDate>Sun,
26 Apr
2015 14:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9369 <description><p
>I am happy to report that the Debian Edu team sent out
9370 <a href=
"https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2015/
04/msg00000.html
">this
9371 announcement today
</a
>:
</p
>
9374 the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is pleased to announce the first
9375 *beta* release of Debian Edu
"Jessie
" 8.0+edu0~b1, which for the first
9376 time is composed entirely of packages from the current Debian stable
9377 release, Debian
8 "Jessie
".
9379 (As most reading this will know, Debian
"Jessie
" hasn
't actually been
9380 released by now. The release is still in progress but should finish
9383 We expect to make a final release of Debian Edu
"Jessie
" in the coming
9384 weeks, timed with the first point release of Debian Jessie. Upgrades
9385 from this beta release of Debian Edu Jessie to the final release will
9386 be possible and encouraged!
9388 Please report feedback to debian-edu@lists.debian.org and/or submit
9389 bugs: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
9391 Debian Edu - sometimes also known as
"Skolelinux
" - is a complete
9392 operating system for schools, universities and other
9393 organisations. Through its pre- prepared installation profiles
9394 administrators can install servers, workstations and laptops which
9395 will work in harmony on the school network. With Debian Edu, the
9396 teachers themselves or their technical support staff can roll out a
9397 complete multi-user, multi-machine study environment within hours or
9400 Debian Edu is already in use at several hundred schools all over the
9401 world, particularly in Germany, Spain and Norway. Installations come
9402 with hundreds of applications pre-installed, plus the whole Debian
9403 archive of thousands of compatible packages within easy reach.
9405 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
9406 installation instructions are available, including detailed
9407 instructions in the manual explaining the first steps, such as setting
9408 up a network or adding users. Please note that the password for the
9409 user your prompted for during installation must have a length of at
9412 == Where to download ==
9414 A multi-architecture CD / usbstick image (
649 MiB) for network booting
9415 can be downloaded at the following locations:
9417 http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-
8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso
9418 rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-
8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso .
9420 The SHA1SUM of this image is:
54a524d16246cddd8d2cfd6ea52f2dd78c47ee0a
9422 Alternatively an extended DVD / usbstick image (
4.9 GiB) is also
9423 available, with more software included (saving additional download
9426 http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-
8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
9427 rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-
8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
9429 The SHA1SUM of this image is: fb1f1504a490c077a48653898f9d6a461cb3c636
9431 Sources are available from the Debian archive, see
9432 http://ftp.debian.org/debian-cd/
8.0.0/source/ for some download
9435 == Debian Edu Jessie manual in seven languages ==
9437 Please see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/ for
9438 the English version of the Debian Edu jessie manual.
9440 This manual has been fully translated to German, French, Italian,
9441 Danish, Dutch and Norwegian Bokmål. A partly translated version exists
9442 for Spanish. See http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/ for
9443 online version of the translated manual.
9445 More information about Debian
8 "Jessie
" itself is provided in the
9446 release notes and the installation manual:
9447 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
9448 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
9451 == Errata / known problems ==
9453 It takes up to
15 minutes for a changed hostname to be updated via
9456 The hostname script fails to update LTSP server hostname (#
783087).
9458 Workaround: run update-hostname-from-ip on the client to update the
9459 hostname immediately.
9461 Check https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie for a possibly
9462 more current and complete list.
9464 == Some more details about Debian Edu
8.0+edu0~b1 Codename Jessie released
2015-
04-
25 ==
9466 === Software updates ===
9468 Everything which is new in Debian
8 Jessie, e.g.:
9470 * Linux kernel
3.16.7-ctk9; for the i386 architecture, support for
9471 i486 processors has been dropped; oldest supported ones: i586 (like
9472 Intel Pentium and AMD K5).
9474 * Desktop environments KDE Plasma Workspaces
4.11.13, GNOME
3.14,
9475 Xfce
4.12, LXDE
0.5.6
9476 * new optional desktop environment: MATE
1.8
9477 * KDE Plasma Workspaces is installed by default; to choose one of
9478 the others see the manual.
9479 * the browsers Iceweasel
31 ESR and Chromium
41
9483 * CUPS print system
1.7.5
9484 * new boot framework: systemd
9485 * Educational toolbox GCompris
14.12
9486 * Music creator Rosegarden
14.02
9487 * Image editor Gimp
2.8.14
9488 * Virtual stargazer Stellarium
0.13.1
9491 * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
9492 * Debian Jessie includes about
43000 packages available for installation.
9493 * More information about Debian
8 Jessie is provided in its release
9494 notes and the installation manual, see the link above.
9496 === Installation changes ===
9498 Installations done via PXE now also install firmware automatically
9499 for the hardware present.
9503 A number of bugs have been fixed in this release; the most noticeable
9504 from a user perspective:
9506 * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
9507 DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
9508 information is corrected (
710362)
9510 * shutdown-at-night now shuts the system down if gdm3 is used (
775608).
9512 === Sugar desktop removed ===
9514 As the Sugar desktop was removed from Debian Jessie, it is also not
9515 available in Debian Edu jessie.
9518 == About Debian Edu / Skolelinux ==
9520 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on
9521 Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
9522 configured school network. Directly after installation a school server
9523 running all services needed for a school network is set up just
9524 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
9525 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
9526 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
9527 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
9528 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
9529 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
9530 services. The desktop contains more than
60 educational software
9531 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
9532 can choose between KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
9537 The Debian Project was founded in
1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
9538 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
9539 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
9540 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
9541 maintain Debian software. Available in
70 languages, and supporting a
9542 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
9547 Thanks to everyone making Debian and Debian Edu / Skolelinux happen!
9554 <title>Debian Edu interview: Shirish Agarwal
</title>
9555 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Shirish_Agarwal.html
</link>
9556 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Shirish_Agarwal.html
</guid>
9557 <pubDate>Wed,
15 Apr
2015 09:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9558 <description><p
>It was a surprise to me to learn that project to create a complete
9559 computer system for schools I
've involved in,
9560 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>, was
9561 being used in India. But apparently it is, and I managed to get an
9562 interview with one of the friends of the project there, Shirish
9565 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
9567 <p
>My name is Shirish Agarwal. Based out of the educational and
9568 historical city of Pune, from the western state of Maharashtra, India.
9569 My bread comes from giving training, giving policy tips,
9570 installations on free software to mom and pop shops in different
9571 fields from Desktop publishing to retail shops as well as work with
9572 few software start-ups as well.
</p
>
9574 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
9575 project?
</strong
></p
>
9577 <p
>It started innocently enough. I have been using Debian for a few
9578 years and in one local minidebconf / debutsav I was asked if there was
9579 anything for schools or education. I had worked / played with free
9580 educational softwares such as Gcompris and Stellarium for my many
9581 nieces and nephews so researched and found Debian Edu or Skolelinux as
9582 it was known then. Since then I have started using the various
9583 education meta-packages provided by the project.
</p
>
9585 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9586 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
9588 <p
>It
's closest I have seen where a package full of educational
9589 software are packed, which are free and open (both literally and
9590 figuratively). Even if I take the simplest software which is
9591 gcompris, the number of activities therein are amazing. Another one of
9592 the softwares that I have liked for a long time is stellarium. Even
9593 pysycache is cool except for couple of issues I encountered
9594 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
781841">#
781841</a
> and
9595 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
781842">#
781842</a
>.
</p
>
9597 <p
>I prefer software installed on the system over web based solutions,
9598 as a web site can disappear any time but the software on disk has the
9599 possibility of a larger life span. Of course with both it
's more a
9600 question if it has enough users who make it fun or sustainable or both
9601 for the developer per-se.
</p
>
9603 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9604 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
9606 <p
>I do see that the Debian Edu team seems to be short-handed and I
9607 think more efforts should be made to make it popular and ask and take
9608 help from people and the larger community wherever possible.
</p
>
9610 <p
>I don
't see any disadvantage to use Skolelinux apart from the fact
9611 that most apps. are generic which is good or bad how you see it.
9612 However, saying that I do acknowledge the fact that the canvas is
9613 pretty big and there are lot of interesting ideas that could be done
9614 but for reasons not known not done or if done I don
't know about them.
9615 Let me share some of the ideas (these are more upstream based but
9616 still) I have had for a long time :
</p
>
9618 <p
>1. Classical maths question of two trains in opposing directions
9619 each running @x kmph/mph at y distance, when they will meet and how
9620 far would each travel and similar questions like these.
9622 <p
>The computer is a fantastic system where questions like these can
9623 be drawn, animated and the methodology and answers teased out in
9624 interactive manner. While sites such as the
9625 <a href=
"http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.two.trains.html
">Ask
9626 Dr. Math FAQ on The Two Trains problem
</a
> (as an example or point of
9627 inspiration) can be used there is lot more that can be done. I dunno
9628 if there is a free software which does something like this. The idea
9629 being a blend of objects + animation + interaction which does
9630 this. The whole interaction could be gamified with points or sounds or
9631 colourful celebration whenever the user gets even part of the question
9632 or/and methodology right. That would help reinforce good behaviour.
9633 This understanding could be used to share/showcase everything from how
9634 the first wheel came to be, to evolution to how astronomy started,
9635 psychics and everything in-between.
</p
>
9637 <p
>One specific idea in the train part was having the Linux mascot on
9638 one train and the BSD or GNU mascot on the other train and they
9639 meeting somewhere in-between. Characters from blender movies could
9640 also be used.
</p
>
9642 <p
>2. Loads of crossword-puzzles with reference to subjects: We have
9643 enormous data sets in Wikipedia and Wikitionary. I don
't think it
9644 should be a big job to design crossword puzzles. Using categories and
9645 sub-categories it should be doable to have Q
&A single word answers
9646 from the existing data-sets. What would make it easy or hard could be
9647 the length of the word + existence of many or few vowels depending on
9648 the user
's input.
</p
>
9650 <p
>3. Jigsaw puzzles - We already have a great software called
9651 palapeli with number of slicers making it pretty interesting. What
9652 needs to be done is to download large number of public domain and
9653 copyleft images, tease and use IPTC tags to categorise them into
9654 nature, history etc. and let it loose. This could turn to be really
9655 huge collection of images. One source could be taken from
9656 commons.wikimedia.org, others could be huge collection of royalty-free
9657 stock photos. Potential is immense.
</p
>
9659 <p
>Apart from this, free software suffers in two directions, we lag
9660 both in development (of using new features per-se) and maintenance a
9661 lot. This is more so in educational software as these applications
9662 need to be timely and the opportunity cost of missing deadlines is
9663 immense. If we are able to solve issues of funding for development and
9664 maintenance of such software I don
't see any big difficulties. I know
9665 of few start-ups in and around India who would love to develop and
9666 maintain such software if funding issues could be solved.
</p
>
9668 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
9670 <p
>That would be huge list. Some of the softwares are obviously apt,
9671 aptitude, debdelta, leafpad, the shell of course (zsh nowadays),
9672 quassel for IRC. In games I use shisen-sho while card-games are evenly
9673 between kpat and Aiselriot. In desktops it
's a tie between
9674 gnome-flashback and mate.
</p
>
9676 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
9677 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
9679 <p
>I think it should first start with using specific FOSS apps. in
9680 whatever environment they are. If it
's MS-Windows or Mac so be it.
9681 Once they are habitual with the apps. and there is buy-in from the
9682 school management then it could be installed anywhere. Most of the
9683 people now understand the concept of a repository because of the
9684 various online stores so it isn
't hard to convince on that front.
</p
>
9686 <p
>What is harder is having enough people with technical skills and
9687 passion to service them. If you get buy-in from one or two teachers
9688 then ideas like above could also be asked to be done as a project as
9691 <p
>I think where we fall short more than anything is in marketing. For
9692 instance, Debian has this whole range of fonts in its archive but
9693 there isn
't even a page where all those different fonts in the La
9694 Ipsum format could be tried out for newcomers.
</p
>
9696 <p
>One of the issues faced constantly in installations is with updates
9697 and upgrades. People have this myth that each update and upgrade
9698 means the user interface will / has to change. I have seen this
9699 innumerable times. That perhaps is one of the reasons which browsers
9700 like Iceweasel / Firefox change user interfaces so much, not because
9701 it might be needed or be functional but because people believe that
9702 changed user interfaces are better. This, can easily be pointed with
9703 the user interfaces changed with almost every MS-Windows and Mac OS
9706 <p
>The problems with Debian Edu for deployment are many. The biggest
9707 is the huge gap between what is taught in schools and what Debian Edu
9710 <p
>Me and my friends did teach on week-ends in a government school for
9712 <a href=
"https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/
2012/
10/
08/sharings/
">gathered
9713 some experience
</a
> there. Some of the things we learnt/discovered
9714 there was :
</p
>
9718 <li
>Most of the teachers are very territorial about their subjects
9719 and they do not want you to teach anything out of the
9720 portion/syllabus given.
</li
>
9722 <li
>They want any activity on the system in accordance to whatever
9723 is in the syllabus.
</li
>
9725 <li
>There are huge barriers both with the English language and at
9726 times with objects or whatever. An example, let
's say in gcompris
9727 you have objects falling down and you have to name them and let
's
9728 say the falling object is a hat or a fedora hat, this would not be
9729 as recognizable as say a
9730 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puneri_Pagadi
">Puneri
9731 Pagdi
</a
> so there is need to inject local objects, words wherever
9732 possible. Especially for word-games there are so many hindi words
9733 which have become part of english vocabulary (for instance in
9734 parley), those could be made into a hinglish collection or
9735 something but that is something for upstream to do.
</li
>
9742 <title>I
'm going to the Open Source Developers
' Conference Nordic
2015!
</title>
9743 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_m_going_to_the_Open_Source_Developers__Conference_Nordic_2015_.html
</link>
9744 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_m_going_to_the_Open_Source_Developers__Conference_Nordic_2015_.html
</guid>
9745 <pubDate>Tue,
7 Apr
2015 10:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9746 <description><p
>I am happy to let you all know that I
'm going to the
<a
9747 href=
"http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/
">Open Source Developers
'
9748 Conference Nordic
2015</a
>!
</p
>
9750 <p
>It take place Friday
8th to Sunday
10th of May in Oslo next to
9751 where I work, and I finally got around to submitting
9752 <a href=
"http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talk/
6192">a talk proposal for
9753 it
</a
> (dead link for most people until the talk is accepted). As
9754 part of my involvement with the
9755 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">Norwegian Unix User Group member
9756 association
</a
> I have been slightly involved in the planning of this
9757 conference for a while now, with a focus on organising a Civic Hacking
9758 Hackathon with our friends
9759 over at
<a href=
"http://www.mysociety.org/
">mySociety
</a
> and
9760 <a href=
"http://www.holderdeord.no/
">Holder de ord
</a
>. This part is
9761 named the
'My Society
' track in the program. There is still space for
9762 more talks and participants. I hope to see you there.
</p
>
9764 <p
>Check out
<a href=
"http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talks
">the talks
9765 submitted and accepted so far
</a
>.
</p
>
9770 <title>Proof reading the Norwegian translation of Free Culture by Lessig
</title>
9771 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Proof_reading_the_Norwegian_translation_of_Free_Culture_by_Lessig.html
</link>
9772 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Proof_reading_the_Norwegian_translation_of_Free_Culture_by_Lessig.html
</guid>
9773 <pubDate>Sat,
4 Apr
2015 09:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9774 <description><p
>During eastern I had some time to continue working on the Norwegian
9775 <a href=
"http://www.docbook.org/
">docbook
</a
> version of the
2004 book
9776 <a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
> by Lawrence Lessig.
9777 At the moment I am proof reading the finished text, looking for typos,
9778 inconsistent wordings and sentences that do not flow as they should.
9779 I
'm more than two thirds done with the text, and welcome others to
9780 check the text up to chapter
13. The current status is available on the
9781 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>
9782 project pages. You can also check out the
9783 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true
">PDF
</a
>,
9784 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true
">EPUB
</a
>
9785 and HTML version available in the
9786 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive
">archive
9787 directory
</a
>.
</p
>
9789 <p
>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
9790 you find any.
</p
>
9795 <title>Frikanalen, Norwegian TV channel for technical topics
</title>
9796 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html
</link>
9797 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html
</guid>
9798 <pubDate>Mon,
9 Mar
2015 11:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
9799 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">Norwegian Unix User Group
</a
>,
9800 where I am a member, and where people interested in free software,
9801 open standards and UNIX like operating systems like Linux and the BSDs
9802 come together, record our monthly technical presentations on video.
9803 The purpose is to document the talks and spread them to a wider
9804 audience. For this, the the Norwegian nationwide open channel
9805 <a href=
"http://www.frikanalen.no/
">Frikanalen
</a
> is a useful venue.
9806 Since a few days ago, when I figured out the
9807 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/api/
">REST API
</a
> to program the
9808 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/guide/
">channel time schedule
</a
>,
9809 the channel has been filled with NUUG talks, related recordings and
9810 some Creative Commons licensed TED talks (from archive.org). I fill
9811 all
"leftover bits
" on the channel with content from NUUG, which at
9812 the moment is almost
17 of
24 hours every day.
</p
>
9814 <p
>The list of NUUG videos
9815 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/organization/
82">uploaded so far
</a
>
9816 include things like a
9817 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/
625090">one hour talk by John
9818 Perry Barlow when he visited Oslo
</a
>, a presentation of
9819 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/
624275">Haiku, the BeOS
9820 re-implementation
</a
>, the
9821 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/
624493">history of FiksGataMi,
9822 the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet
</a
>, the good old
9823 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/
623566">Warriors of the net
9824 video
</A
> and many others.
</p
>
9826 <p
>We have a large backlog of NUUG talks not yet uploaded to
9827 Frikanalen, and plan to upload every useful bit to the channel to
9828 spread the word there. I also hope to find useful recordings from the
9829 Chaos Computer Club and Debian conferences and spread them on the
9830 channel as well. But this require locating the videos and their meta
9831 information (title, description, license, etc), and preparing the
9832 recordings for broadcast, and I have not yet had the spare time to
9833 focus on this. Perhaps you want to help. Please join us on IRC,
9834 <a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/%
23nuug
">#nuug on irc.freenode.net
</a
>
9835 if you want to help make this happen.
</p
>
9837 <p
>But as I said, already the channel is already almost exclusively
9838 filled with technical topics, and if you want to learn something new
9839 today, check out the
<a href=
"http://www.frikanalen.tv/se
">Ogg Theora
9840 web stream
</a
> or use one of the other ways to get access to the
9841 channel. Unfortunately the Ogg Theora recoding for distribution still
9842 do not properly sync the video and sound. It is generated by recoding
9843 a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H
.264) to
9844 Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and we have not been able to find a way that
9845 produces acceptable quality. Help needed, please get in touch if you
9846 know how to fix it using free software.
</p
>
9851 <title>The Citizenfour documentary on the Snowden confirmations to Norway
</title>
9852 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Citizenfour_documentary_on_the_Snowden_confirmations_to_Norway.html
</link>
9853 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Citizenfour_documentary_on_the_Snowden_confirmations_to_Norway.html
</guid>
9854 <pubDate>Sat,
28 Feb
2015 22:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
9855 <description><p
>Today I was happy to learn that the documentary
9856 <a href=
"https://citizenfourfilm.com/
">Citizenfour
</a
> by
9857 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras
">Laura Poitras
</a
>
9858 finally will show up in Norway. According to the magazine
9859 <a href=
"http://montages.no/
">Montages
</a
>, a deal has finally been
9861 <a href=
"http://montages.no/nyheter/snowden-dokumentaren-citizenfour-far-norsk-kinodistribusjon/
">Cinema
9862 distribution in Norway
</a
> and the movie will have its premiere soon.
9863 This is great news. As part of my involvement with
9864 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">the Norwegian Unix User Group
</a
>, me and
9866 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_til_Norge_.shtml
">tried
9867 to get the movie to Norway
</a
> ourselves, but obviously
9868 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_endelig_til_Norge_.shtml
">we
9869 were too late
</a
> and Tor Fosse beat us to it. I am happy he did, as
9870 the movie will make its way to the public and we do not have to make
9871 it happen ourselves.
9872 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM
">The trailer
</a
>
9873 can be seen on youtube, if you are curious what kind of film this
9876 <p
>The whistle blower Edward Snowden really deserve political asylum
9877 here in Norway, but I am afraid he would not be safe.
</p
>
9882 <title>The Norwegian open channel Frikanalen -
24x7 on the Internet
</title>
9883 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Norwegian_open_channel_Frikanalen___24x7_on_the_Internet.html
</link>
9884 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Norwegian_open_channel_Frikanalen___24x7_on_the_Internet.html
</guid>
9885 <pubDate>Wed,
25 Feb
2015 09:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
9886 <description><p
>The Norwegian nationwide open channel
9887 <a href=
"http://www.frikanalen.no/
">Frikanalen
</a
> is still going
9888 strong. It allow everyone to send the video they want on national
9889 television. It is a TV station administrated completely using a web
9890 browser, running only
<ahref=
"https://github.com/Frikanalen
">Free
9891 Software
</a
>, providing
<ahref=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api
">a REST
9892 api
</a
> for administrators and members, and with distribution on the
9893 national DVB-T distribution network RiksTV. But only between
12:
00
9894 and
17:
30 Norwegian time. This has finally changed, after many years
9895 with limited distribution. A few weeks ago, we set up a Ogg Theora
9896 stream via icecast to allow everyone with Internet access to check out
9897 the channel the rest of the day. This is presented on
9898 <a href=
"http://www.frikanalen.tv/se
">the Frikanalen web site now
</a
>. And
9899 since a few days ago, the channel is also available
9900 via
<a href=
"https://www.uninett.no/iptv-tilgang
">multicast on
9901 UNINETT
</a
>, available for those using IPTV TVs and set-top boxes in
9902 the Norwegian National Research and Education network.
</p
>
9904 <p
>If you want to see what is on the channel, point your media player
9905 to one of these sources. The first should work with most players and
9906 browsers, while as far as I know, the multicast UDP stream only work
9910 <li
><a href=
"http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv
">http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv
</a
></li
>
9911 <li
>udp://@
224.17.43.129:
1234</li
>
9914 <p
>The Ogg Theora / icecast stream is not working well, as the video
9915 and audio is slightly out of sync. We have not been able to figure
9916 out how to fix it. It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG
9917 transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H
.264) to Ogg Theora /
9918 Vorbis, and the result is less then stellar. If you have ideas how to
9919 fix it, please let us know on frikanalen (at) nuug.no. We currently
9920 use this with ffmpeg2theora
0.29:
</p
>
9922 <blockquote
><pre
>
9923 ./ffmpeg2theora.linux
&lt;OBE_gemini_URL.ts
&gt; -F
25 -x
720 -y
405 \
9924 --deinterlace --inputfps
25 -c
1 -H
48000 --keyint
8 --buf-delay
100 \
9925 --nosync -V
700 -o - | oggfwd video.nuug.no
8000 &lt;pw
&gt; /frikanalen.ogv
9926 </pre
></blockquote
>
9928 <p
>If you get the multicast UDP stream working, please let me know, as
9929 I am curious how far the multicast stream reach. It do not make it to
9930 my home network, nor any other commercially available network in
9931 Norway that I am aware of.
</p
>
9936 <title>Nude body scanner now present on Norwegian airport
</title>
9937 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nude_body_scanner_now_present_on_Norwegian_airport.html
</link>
9938 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nude_body_scanner_now_present_on_Norwegian_airport.html
</guid>
9939 <pubDate>Tue,
10 Feb
2015 15:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
9940 <description><p
>Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, today report
9942 <a href=
"http://www.aftenposten.no/reise/Slik-skannes-kroppen-din-i-fremtidens-sikkerhetskontroll-
490666_1.snd
">three
9943 of the nude body scanners now is put to use at Gardermoen
</a
>, the
9944 main airport in Norway. This way the travelers can have their body
9945 photographed without cloths when visiting Norway. Of course this
9946 horrible news is presented with a positive spin, stating that
"now
9947 travelers can move past the security check point faster and more
9948 efficiently
", but fail to mention that the machines in question take
9949 pictures of their nude bodies and store them internally in the
9950 computer, while only presenting sketch figure of the body to the
9951 public. The article is written in a way that leave the impression
9952 that the new machines do not take these nude pictures and only create
9953 the sketch figures. In reality the same nude pictures are still
9954 taken, but not presented to everyone. They are still available for
9955 the owners of the system and the people doing maintenance of the
9956 scanners, as long as they are taken and stored.
</p
>
9958 <p
>Wikipedia have a more on
9959 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_body_scanner
">Full body
9960 scanners
</a
>, including example images and a summary of the
9961 controversy about these scanners.
</p
>
9963 <p
>Personally I will decline to use these machines, as I believe strip
9964 searches of my body is a very intrusive attack on my privacy, and not
9965 something everyone should have to accept to travel.
</p
>
9970 <title>Nagios module to check if the Frikanalen video stream is working
</title>
9971 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nagios_module_to_check_if_the_Frikanalen_video_stream_is_working.html
</link>
9972 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nagios_module_to_check_if_the_Frikanalen_video_stream_is_working.html
</guid>
9973 <pubDate>Sun,
8 Feb
2015 13:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
9974 <description><p
>When running a TV station with both broadcast and web stream
9975 distribution, it is useful to know that the stream is working. As I
9976 am involved in the Norwegian open channel
9977 <a href=
"http://www.frikanalen.no/
">Frikanalen
</a
> as part of my
9978 activity in the
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">NUUG member
9979 organisation
</a
>, I wrote a script to use mplayer to connect to a
9980 video stream, pick two images
35 seconds apart and compare them. If
9981 the images are missing or identical, something is probably wrong with
9982 the stream and an alarm should be triggered. The script is written as
9983 a Nagios plugin, allowing us to use Nagios to run the check regularly
9984 and sound the alarm when something is wrong. It is able to detect
9985 both a hanging and a broken video stream.
</p
>
9987 <p
>I just uploaded the code for the script into the
9988 <a href=
"https://github.com/Frikanalen/frikanalen/blob/master/nagios-plugin/check_video_stream_images
">Frikanalen
9989 git repository
</a
> on github. If you run a TV station with web
9990 streaming, perhaps you can find it useful too.
</p
>
9992 <p
>Last year, the Frikanalen public TV station transformed into using
9993 only Linux based free software to administrate, schedule and
9994 distribute the TV content. The
9995 <a href=
"https://github.com/Frikanalen
">source code for the entire TV
9996 station
</a
> is available from the Github project page. Everyone can
9997 use it to send their content on national TV, and we provide both a web
9998 GUI and
<a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api/
">a web API
</a
> to
9999 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/login/?next=/members/video/
">add
</a
>
10000 and
<a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/members/plan/
">schedule
10001 content
</a
>. And thanks to last weeks developer gathering and
10002 following activity, we now have the schedule
10003 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/xmltv/
2015/
01/
01">available as
10004 XMLTV
</a
> too. Still a lot of work left to do, especially with the
10005 process to add videos and with the scheduling, so your contribution is
10006 most welcome. Perhaps you want to set up your own TV station?
</p
>
10008 <p
>Update
2015-
02-
25: Got a tip from Uninett about their
10009 <a href=
"https://scm.uninett.no/maalepaaler/qstream/
">qstream
10010 monitoring system
</a
>, which gather connection time, jitter, packet
10011 loss and burst bandwidth usage. It look useful to check if UDP
10012 streams are working as they should.
</p
>
10017 <title>Norwegian Bokmål subtitles for the FSF video User Liberation
</title>
10018 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_subtitles_for_the_FSF_video_User_Liberation.html
</link>
10019 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_subtitles_for_the_FSF_video_User_Liberation.html
</guid>
10020 <pubDate>Mon,
12 Jan
2015 21:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
10021 <description><p
>A few days ago, the
<a href=
"https://www.fsf.org/
">Free Software
10022 Foundation
</a
> announced a new video
10023 <a href=
"https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video
">explaining
10024 Free software
</a
> in simple terms. The video named User Liberation is
10025 3 minutes long, and I recommend showing it to everyone you know as a
10026 way to explain what Free Software is all about. Unfortunately several
10027 of the people I know do not understand English and Spanish, so it did
10028 not make sense to show it to them.
</p
>
10030 <p
>But today I was told that
10031 <a href=
"https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video
">English
10032 subtitles were available
</a
> and set out to provide Norwegian Bokmål
10033 subtitles based on these. The result has been sent to FSF and made
10035 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/fsf-video-user-liberation-subtitles
">a
10036 git repository
</a
> provided by Github. Please let me know if you find
10037 errors or have improvements to the subtitles.
</p
>
10039 <p
>Update
2015-
02-
03: Since I publised this post, FSF created a
10041 <a href=
"http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:FSF/User_Liberation_Video_Translation
">project
10042 to track subtitles
</A
> for the video.
</p
>
10047 <title>Updated version of the Norwegian web service FiksGataMi
</title>
10048 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_version_of_the_Norwegian_web_service_FiksGataMi.html
</link>
10049 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_version_of_the_Norwegian_web_service_FiksGataMi.html
</guid>
10050 <pubDate>Tue,
30 Dec
2014 17:
55:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
10051 <description><p
>I am very happy that we in the
10052 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">Norwegian Unix User group (NUUG)
</a
>,
10053 spearheaded by Marius Halden from NUUG and Matthew Somerville from
10054 <a href=
"http://www.mysociety.org/
">mySociety
</a
>, finally managed to
10055 upgrade the code base for the Norwegian version of
10056 <a href=
"http://fixmystreet.org/
">FixMyStreet
</a
>. This
10057 was the first major update since
2011. The refurbished
10058 <a href=
"http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi
</a
> is already live, and
10059 seem to hold up the pressure. The
10060 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__FiksGataMi_i_oppdatert_og_mobilvennlig_klesdrakt.shtml
">press
10061 release and announcement
</a
> went out this morning.
</p
>
10063 <p
>FixMyStreet is a web platform for allowing the citizens to easily
10064 report problems with public infrastructure to the responsible
10065 authorities. Think of it as a shared mail client with map support,
10066 allowing everyone to see what already was reported and comment on the
10067 reports in public.
</p
>
10072 <title>Of course USA loses in cyber war - NSA and friends made sure it would happen
</title>
10073 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Of_course_USA_loses_in_cyber_war___NSA_and_friends_made_sure_it_would_happen.html
</link>
10074 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Of_course_USA_loses_in_cyber_war___NSA_and_friends_made_sure_it_would_happen.html
</guid>
10075 <pubDate>Fri,
19 Dec
2014 13:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
10076 <description><p
>So, Sony caved in
10077 (
<a href=
"https://twitter.com/RobLowe/status/
545338568512917504">according
10078 to Rob Lowe
</a
>) and demonstrated that America lost its first cyberwar
10079 (
<a href=
"https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/
545339074975109122">according
10080 to Newt Gingrich
</a
>). It should not surprise anyone, after the
10081 whistle blower Edward Snowden documented that the government of USA
10082 and their allies for many years have done their best to make sure the
10083 technology used by its citizens is filled with security holes allowing
10084 the secret services to spy on its own population. No one in their
10085 right minds could believe that the ability to snoop on the people all
10086 over the globe could only be used by the personnel authorized to do so
10087 by the president of the United States of America. If the capabilities
10088 are there, they will be used by friend and foe alike, and now they are
10089 being used to bring Sony on its knees.
</p
>
10091 <p
>I doubt it will a lesson learned, and expect USA to lose its next
10092 cyber war too, given how eager the western intelligence communities
10093 (and probably the non-western too, but it is less in the news) seem to
10094 be to continue its current dragnet surveillance practice.
</p
>
10096 <p
>There is a reason why China and others are trying to move away from
10097 Windows to Linux and other alternatives, and it is not to avoid
10098 sending its hard earned dollars to Cayman Islands (or whatever
10099 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven
">tax haven
</a
>
10100 Microsoft is using these days to collect the majority of its
10101 income. :)
</p
>
10106 <title>How to stay with sysvinit in Debian Jessie
</title>
10107 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_stay_with_sysvinit_in_Debian_Jessie.html
</link>
10108 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_stay_with_sysvinit_in_Debian_Jessie.html
</guid>
10109 <pubDate>Sat,
22 Nov
2014 01:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
10110 <description><p
>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
10111 sysvinit as its boot system by default. But how can one keep using
10112 sysvinit in Jessie? It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
10114 <a href=
"http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/
201410/
2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html
">Erich
10115 Schubert
</a
> and
10116 <a href=
"http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/
2014/still_universal/
">Simon
10117 McVittie
</a
>.
10119 <p
>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
10120 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
10121 <tt
>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit
</tt
> with this content before
10122 you upgrade:
</p
>
10124 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
10125 Package: systemd-sysv
10126 Pin: release o=Debian
10128 </pre
></blockquote
><p
>
10130 <p
>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
10131 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
10132 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
10133 systemd as a default boot system. The end result should be that the
10134 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.
</p
>
10136 <p
>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
10137 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
10138 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
10139 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot. Either by
10140 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
10141 preseed file used. First, the kernel command line argument:
10143 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
10144 preseed/late_command=
"in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core
"
10145 </pre
></blockquote
><p
>
10147 <p
>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:
</p
>
10149 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
10150 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
10151 </pre
></blockquote
><p
>
10153 <p
>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
10154 the sysvinit-core package.
</p
>
10156 <p
>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
10157 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
10158 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
10159 devices show up during boot. But on the other hand, the new default
10160 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
10161 Jessie is released.
</p
>
10163 <p
>Update
2014-
11-
26: Inspired by
10164 <ahref=
"https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-
10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-
10-tg
">a
10165 blog post by Torsten Glaser
</a
>, added --purge to the preseed
10171 <title>A Debian package for SMTP via Tor (aka SMTorP) using exim4
</title>
10172 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Debian_package_for_SMTP_via_Tor__aka_SMTorP__using_exim4.html
</link>
10173 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Debian_package_for_SMTP_via_Tor__aka_SMTorP__using_exim4.html
</guid>
10174 <pubDate>Mon,
10 Nov
2014 13:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
10175 <description><p
>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
10176 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
10177 democracy. But this right is under serious attack these days.
</p
>
10179 <p
>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
10180 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
10181 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
10182 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor. Such SMTP option would be
10183 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
10184 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
10185 to the people peeking on the wire. I
10186 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/
2014-October/
006493.html
">proposed
10187 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October
</a
> and got a
10188 lot of useful feedback and suggestions. It also became obvious to me
10189 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
10190 documented by Johannes Berg as early as
2006, and both
10191 <a href=
"https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP
">the
10192 Mailpile
</a
> and
<a href=
"http://dee.su/cables
">the Cables
</a
> systems
10193 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.
</p
>
10195 <p
>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
10196 providing the SMTP protocol on port
25, and use email addresses
10197 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion. With such addresses
10198 the connections to port
25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
10199 go to the correct SMTP server. To do this, one need to configure the
10200 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
10201 emails for this .onion domain. To learn more about Exim configuration
10202 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
10203 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
10204 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian. Getting it to work
10205 were fairly easy, and
10206 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp
">the
10207 source code for the Debian package
</a
> is available from github. I
10208 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
10209 useful approach.
</p
>
10211 <p
>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
10212 mail system installed (or run
<tt
>apt-get purge exim4-config
</tt
> to
10213 get rid of exim4). Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
10214 above, build the deb and install it on the machine. Next, run
10215 <tt
>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service
</tt
> and follow
10216 the instructions to get the service up and running. Restart tor and
10217 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
10220 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
10221 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
10222 --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
10223 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
10225 <p
>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor. Replace the email
10226 address with your own address to test your server. :)
</p
>
10228 <p
>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
10229 easier and more automatic. Especially the tor setup need more work.
10230 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
10231 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
10232 architecture independent. It would probably also make the code easier
10233 to review. The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
10234 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd. It would be better if
10235 no daemon and no socket is needed. I suspect it is possible to get
10236 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
10237 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
10240 <p
>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
10241 <tt
>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
</tt
> mail address, deliverable over
10242 SMTorP. :)
</p
>
10247 <title>First Jessie based Debian Edu released (alpha0)
</title>
10248 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html
</link>
10249 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html
</guid>
10250 <pubDate>Mon,
27 Oct
2014 20:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
10251 <description><p
>I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just
10253 <a href=
"https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2014/
10/msg00000.html
">this
10254 announcement
</a
>:
</p
>
10257 The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
10258 Jessie
8.0+edu0~alpha0
10260 Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
10261 various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
10262 and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
10263 Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
10264 roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
10265 hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
10266 pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
10268 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
10269 installation instructions are available, including detailed
10270 instructions in the manual[
1] explaining the first steps, such as
10271 setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
10272 for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
10273 of at least
5 characters!
10275 [
1]
&lt;URL:
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie
">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie
</a
> &gt;
10277 Would you like to give your school
's computer a longer life? Are you
10278 tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
10279 reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
10280 the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
10281 Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
10283 Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
10284 mostly in Germany and Norway.
10286 About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
10287 ===============================
10289 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[
2], is a Linux distribution based
10290 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
10291 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
10292 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
10293 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
10294 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
10295 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
10296 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
10297 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
10298 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
10299 services. The desktop contains more than
60 educational software
10300 packages[
3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
10301 schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
10304 [
2]
&lt;URL:
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">http://www.skolelinux.org/
</a
> &gt;
10305 [
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;
10307 Full release notes and manual
10308 =============================
10310 Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
10311 and bugfixes of Debian Edu
8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
10312 list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[
4] for
10313 the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
10314 available, see the manual translation overview[
5].
10316 [
4]
&lt;URL:
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features
">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features
</a
> &gt;
10317 [
5]
&lt;URL:
<a href=
"http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/
">http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/
</a
> &gt;
10322 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (
624 MiB) you can use
10324 *
<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
>
10325 *
<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
>
10326 * rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-
8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
10328 The SHA1SUM of this image is:
361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
10330 New features for Debian Edu
8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released
2014-
10-
27
10331 ===============================================================================
10334 Installation changes
10335 --------------------
10337 * PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
10342 Everything which is new in Debian Jessie
8.0, eg:
10344 * Linux kernel
3.16.x
10345 * Desktop environments KDE
"Plasma
" 4.11.12, GNOME
3.14, Xfce
4.10,
10346 LXDE
0.5.6 and MATE
1.8 (KDE
"Plasma
" is installed by default; to
10347 choose one of the others see manual.)
10348 * the browsers Iceweasel
31 ESR and Chromium
38
10349 * !LibreOffice
4.3.3
10352 * CUPS print system
1.7.5
10353 * new boot framework: systemd
10354 * Educational toolbox GCompris
14.07
10355 * Music creator Rosegarden
14.02
10356 * Image editor Gimp
2.8.14
10357 * Virtual stargazer Stellarium
0.13.0
10360 * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
10361 * Debian Jessie includes about
42000 packages available for
10363 * More information about Debian Jessie
8.0 is provided in the release
10364 notes[
6] and the installation manual[
7].
10366 [
6]
&lt;URL:
<a href=
"http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
</a
> &gt;
10367 [
7]
&lt;URL:
<a href=
"http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
</a
> &gt;
10372 * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
10373 DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
10374 information is corrected (Debian bug #
710362)
10377 Documentation and translation updates
10378 -------------------------------------
10380 * The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
10381 Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
10382 Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
10387 * Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
10388 server takes more time.
10389 * To manage printers localhost:
631 has to be used, currently www:
631
10392 Regressions / known problems
10393 ----------------------------
10395 * Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
10396 exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #
765694
10397 and Debian bug #
762103).
10398 * Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
10399 #
764594). The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
10400 * PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
10401 work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
10402 Will be fixed when Debian bug #
766960 is fixed in Jessie.
10404 See the status page[
8] for the complete list.
10406 [
8]
&lt;URL:
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie
">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie
</a
> &gt;
10411 &lt;URL:
<a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
</a
> &gt;
10416 The Debian Project was founded in
1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
10417 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
10418 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
10419 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
10420 maintain Debian software. Available in
70 languages, and supporting a
10421 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
10424 Contact Information
10425 For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[
9] or send
10426 mail to press@debian.org.
10428 [
9]
&lt;URL:
<a href=
"http://www.debian.org/
">http://www.debian.org/
</a
> &gt;
10434 <title>I spent last weekend recording MakerCon Nordic
</title>
10435 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html
</link>
10436 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html
</guid>
10437 <pubDate>Thu,
23 Oct
2014 23:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10438 <description><p
>I spent last weekend at
<a href=
"http://www.makercon.no/
">Makercon
10439 Nordic
</a
>, a great conference and workshop for makers in Norway and
10440 the surrounding countries. I had volunteered on behalf of the
10441 Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG) to video record the talks, and we
10442 had a great and exhausting time recording the entire day, two days in
10443 a row. There were only two of us, Hans-Petter and me, and we used the
10444 regular video equipment for NUUG, with a
10445 <a href=
"http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/
">dvswitch
</a
>, a
10446 camera and a VGA to DV convert box, and mixed video and slides
10449 <p
>Hans-Petter did the post-processing, consisting of uploading the
10450 around
180 GiB of raw video to Youtube, and the result is
10451 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/
">now becoming
10452 public
</a
> on the MakerConNordic account. The videos have the license
10453 NUUG always use on our recordings, which is
10454 <a href=
"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/
3.0/no/
">Creative
10455 Commons Navngivelse-Del på samme vilkår
3.0 Norge
</a
>. Many great
10456 talks available. Check it out! :)
</p
>
10461 <title>listadmin, the quick way to moderate mailman lists - nice free software
</title>
10462 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/listadmin__the_quick_way_to_moderate_mailman_lists___nice_free_software.html
</link>
10463 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/listadmin__the_quick_way_to_moderate_mailman_lists___nice_free_software.html
</guid>
10464 <pubDate>Wed,
22 Oct
2014 20:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10465 <description><p
>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
10466 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
10467 operate. First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
10468 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
10469 and various options for each email address. This take a while for
10470 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
10471 job as a list moderator. But there is a quick alternative,
10472 <a href=
"http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin
">the
10473 listadmin program
</a
>. It allow you to check lists for new messages
10474 to moderate in a fraction of a second. Here is a test run on two
10475 lists I recently took over:
</p
>
10477 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
10478 % time listadmin xiph
10479 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
10480 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
10486 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
10488 <p
>In
1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
10489 there are no message in the moderation queue. Every morning I
10490 currently moderate
68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
10491 minutes. When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
10492 ago, there were
400 emails waiting in the moderator queue. It took me
10493 less than
15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
10496 <p
>If you install
10497 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin
">the listadmin
10498 package
</a
> from Debian and create a file
<tt
>~/.listadmin.ini
</tt
>
10499 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:
</p
>
10501 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
10502 username username@example.org
10505 discard_if_reason
"Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list.
"
10508 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
10509 mailman-list@lists.example.com
10512 other-list@otherserver.example.org
10513 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
10515 <p
>There are other options to set as well. Check the manual page to
10516 learn the details.
</p
>
10518 <p
>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
10519 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
10520 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
10521 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:
</p
>
10523 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
10524 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=
0 listadmin
10525 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
10527 <p
>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
10528 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
10529 initial screen dump (the xiph argument). Using an argument, only
10530 lists matching the argument string will be processed. This make it
10531 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
10534 <p
>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of
68
10535 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
10536 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
10537 time I could spend elsewhere over the years. It truly is nice free
10538 software.
</p
>
10540 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
10541 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
10542 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
10544 <p
>Update
2014-
10-
27: Added missing
'username
' statement in
10545 configuration example. Also, I
've been told that the
10546 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=
0 setting do not work for everyone. Not
10547 sure why.
</p
>
10552 <title>Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation
</title>
10553 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html
</link>
10554 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html
</guid>
10555 <pubDate>Fri,
17 Oct
2014 14:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10556 <description><p
>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
10557 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
10558 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
10559 Normally something more is needed. But thanks to
10560 <a href=
"https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html
">my isenkram
10561 package
</a
> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
10562 to do this using simple preseeding.
</p
>
10564 <p
>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
10565 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
10566 the kernel modules for the hardware). (It can also install user space
10567 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
10568 of this story.)
</p
>
10570 <p
>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
10571 values are needed. First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
10572 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
10573 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system. This is done by
10574 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
10575 isenkram-cli package. The package name is next passed to debootstrap
10576 for installation. With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
10577 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
10578 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
10579 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.
</p
>
10581 <p
>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
10582 most firmware unfortunately is non-free. This is done by preseeding
10583 the apt-mirror-setup step. This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
10584 hardware it is the only option in Debian.
</p
>
10586 <p
>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
10587 firmware installed automatically by the installer:
</p
>
10589 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
10590 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
10591 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
10592 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
10594 <p
>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
10595 both firmware and user space packages when using this method. It also
10596 do not work well, so use version
0.15 or later. Installing both
10597 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
10598 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
10599 and one for user space programs. The firmware task is enabled by
10600 default, while the one for user space programs is not. This split is
10601 implemented in the package currently in unstable.
</p
>
10603 <p
>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
10604 this recipe work for you. :)
</p
>
10606 <p
>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work. First and
10607 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
10608 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/. So the
10609 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find. First there
10610 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):
</p
>
10612 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
10613 Task: isenkram-packages
10615 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
10616 Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
10618 Test-new-install: show show
10620 Packages: for-current-hardware
10622 Task: isenkram-firmware
10624 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
10625 Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
10626 packages are proposed.
10627 Test-new-install: mark show
10629 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
10630 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
10632 <p
>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
10633 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
10634 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/. The scripts use other scripts to get a
10635 list of packages to install. The for-current-hardware-firmware script
10636 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
10638 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
10641 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
10643 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
10644 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
10646 <p
>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
10647 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)
</p
>
10649 <p
>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
10650 installed, run
<tt
>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
10651 --new-install
</tt
> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
10654 <p
><a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/
">Debian Edu
</a
> will be
10655 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
10656 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.
</p
>
10661 <title>Ubuntu used to show the bread prizes at ICA Storo
</title>
10662 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ubuntu_used_to_show_the_bread_prizes_at_ICA_Storo.html
</link>
10663 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ubuntu_used_to_show_the_bread_prizes_at_ICA_Storo.html
</guid>
10664 <pubDate>Sat,
4 Oct
2014 15:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10665 <description><p
>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen. Above the
10666 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
10667 with Linux kernel
3.2.0-
23 (ie probably version
12.04 LTS) was stuck
10668 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:
</p
>
10670 <p align=
"center
"><img width=
"70%
" src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2014-
10-
04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg
"></p
>
10672 <p
>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
10673 about this hidden Linux installation. It is interesting what
10674 <a href=
"http://revealingerrors.com/
">errors can reveal
</a
>.
</p
>
10679 <title>New lsdvd release version
0.17 is ready
</title>
10680 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_version_0_17_is_ready.html
</link>
10681 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_version_0_17_is_ready.html
</guid>
10682 <pubDate>Sat,
4 Oct
2014 08:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10683 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/
">lsdvd project
</a
>
10684 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
10685 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
10686 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
10689 <p
>I just wrapped up
10690 <a href=
"https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/
32896061/
">a
10691 new lsdvd release
</a
>, available in git or from
10692 <a href=
"https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/
">the
10693 download page
</a
>. This is the changelog dated
2014-
10-
03 for version
10698 <li
>Ignore
'phantom
' audio, subtitle tracks
</li
>
10699 <li
>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
10700 non-existant, to work around additional copy protection
</li
>
10701 <li
>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles
</li
>
10702 <li
>Fix pallete display of first entry
</li
>
10703 <li
>Fix include orders
</li
>
10704 <li
>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway
</li
>
10705 <li
>Fix the chapter count
</li
>
10706 <li
>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
10707 the palette size is the same.
</li
>
10708 <li
>Fix array printing.
</li
>
10709 <li
>Correct subsecond calculations.
</li
>
10710 <li
>Add sector information to the output format.
</li
>
10711 <li
>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
10712 with more GCC compiler warnings.
</li
>
10716 <p
>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
10717 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
10718 project the last nine years. Please check it out. :)
</p
>
10723 <title>How to test Debian Edu Jessie despite some fatal problems with the installer
</title>
10724 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_Debian_Edu_Jessie_despite_some_fatal_problems_with_the_installer.html
</link>
10725 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_Debian_Edu_Jessie_despite_some_fatal_problems_with_the_installer.html
</guid>
10726 <pubDate>Fri,
26 Sep
2014 12:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10727 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
10728 project
</a
> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
10729 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
10730 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
10731 boot of both clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
10732 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
10733 to mention here). We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
10734 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
10735 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
10737 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie
">current
10738 status
</a
> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
10739 work left. Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
10740 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway. Here is a
10741 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.
</p
>
10743 <p
>First, download the test ISO via
10744 <a href=
"ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-
1.iso
">ftp
</a
>,
10745 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-
1.iso
">http
</a
>
10747 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-
1.iso).
10748 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
10749 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
10750 install with some tweaking.
</p
>
10752 <p
>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
10753 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run
</p
>
10755 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
10756 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
10757 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
10759 <p
>and add
'exit
0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
10760 optimization. Return to the installation, select the profile you want
10761 and continue. Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
10762 due to a known bug in eatmydata.
</p
>
10764 <p
>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
10765 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be. All my
10766 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
10767 your need.
</p
>
10769 <p
>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
10770 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
10771 education-desktop-XXX metapackage. XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
10772 or mate. If you want several desktop options, install more than one
10773 metapackage. Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
10774 graphical login screen. This workaround should no longer be needed
10775 once the education-tasks package version
1.801 enter testing in two
10778 <p
>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
10779 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
10780 update the debian-cd git repository. The eatmydata, grub and desktop
10781 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
10782 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again. Well the
10783 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled. The proper fix
10784 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
10785 provided in bug
<a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
702711">#
702711</a
>.
10786 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.
</p
>
10788 <p
>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
10789 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
10790 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.
</p
>
10795 <title>Suddenly I am the new upstream of the lsdvd command line tool
</title>
10796 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Suddenly_I_am_the_new_upstream_of_the_lsdvd_command_line_tool.html
</link>
10797 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Suddenly_I_am_the_new_upstream_of_the_lsdvd_command_line_tool.html
</guid>
10798 <pubDate>Thu,
25 Sep
2014 11:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10799 <description><p
>I use the
<a href=
"https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/
">lsdvd tool
</a
>
10800 to handle my fairly large DVD collection. It is a nice command line
10801 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
10802 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format. But lsdvd have not seen
10803 any new development since
2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
10804 its use with some DVDs. Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
10805 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
10806 project, without any reply. But I use it regularly and would like to
10807 get
<a href=
"https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd
">an updated version
10808 into Debian
</a
>. So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
10809 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
10810 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
10811 over. And yesterday, I became project admin.
</p
>
10813 <p
>I
've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
10814 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
10815 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
10816 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
10817 I
've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
10818 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too. If you got
10819 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
10820 <a href=
"https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/
">the git source
</a
> and join
10821 <a href=
"https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/
">the project mailing
10822 list
</a
>. :)
</p
>
10827 <title>Speeding up the Debian installer using eatmydata and dpkg-divert
</title>
10828 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html
</link>
10829 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html
</guid>
10830 <pubDate>Tue,
16 Sep
2014 14:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10831 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"https://www.debian.org/
">Debian
</a
> installer could be
10832 a lot quicker. When we install more than
2000 packages in
10833 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux / Debian Edu
</a
> using
10834 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
10835 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
10836 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
613428">bug #
613428</a
> about too
10837 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
10838 responsible for unpacking the binary packages. Other parts (like code
10839 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
10840 installation. All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
10841 me. If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
10842 to salvage the half installed system. So the failure sync-ing is
10843 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
10844 relevant while the installer is running.
</p
>
10846 <p
>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
10847 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
10848 change the code in several packages. The idea is not new, but I have
10849 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before. It
10850 depend on the small and clever package
10851 <a href=
"https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata
">eatmydata
</a
>, which
10852 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
10853 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
10854 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly. Instead of
10855 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
10856 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
10857 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
10858 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
10859 "eatmydata
&nbsp;$program
&nbsp;$@
", to get the same effect.
10860 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
10861 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.
</p
>
10863 <p
>The effect was stunning. In my first test it reduced the running
10864 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from
64 to less than
44
10865 minutes (
20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
10866 Latitude D505 machine. I am not quite sure what the optimised time
10867 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
10868 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
10869 installation. As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
10870 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
10871 installation. I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
10872 and got these results. The time measured is the time stamp in
10873 /var/log/syslog between the
"pkgsel: starting tasksel
" and the
10874 "pkgsel: finishing up
" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
10875 yourself. In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
10876 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
10879 <p
><table
>
10882 <th
>Machine/setup
</th
>
10883 <th
>Original tasksel
</th
>
10884 <th
>Optimised tasksel
</th
>
10885 <th
>Reduction
</th
>
10889 <td
>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE
</td
>
10890 <td
>64 min (
07:
46-
08:
50)
</td
>
10891 <td
><44 min (
11:
27-
12:
11)
</td
>
10892 <td
>>20 min
18%
</td
>
10896 <td
>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE
</td
>
10897 <td
>57 min (
08:
48-
09:
45)
</td
>
10898 <td
>34 min (
07:
43-
08:
17)
</td
>
10899 <td
>23 min
40%
</td
>
10903 <td
>Latitude D505 Minimal
</td
>
10904 <td
>22 min (
10:
37-
10:
59)
</td
>
10905 <td
>11 min (
11:
16-
11:
27)
</td
>
10906 <td
>11 min
50%
</td
>
10910 <td
>Thinkpad X200 Minimal
</td
>
10911 <td
>6 min (
08:
19-
08:
25)
</td
>
10912 <td
>4 min (
08:
04-
08:
08)
</td
>
10913 <td
>2 min
33%
</td
>
10917 <td
>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE
</td
>
10918 <td
>19 min (
09:
21-
09:
40)
</td
>
10919 <td
>15 min (
10:
25-
10:
40)
</td
>
10920 <td
>4 min
21%
</td
>
10923 </table
></p
>
10925 <p
>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
10926 time is spent downloading packages. The connection to the Internet
10927 was
100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
10928 significant factor in the measurement. Download typically took a few
10929 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
10930 installed.
</p
>
10932 <p
>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
10933 <a href=
"https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
">Debian
10934 Installer
</a
>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
10935 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
10936 installation. I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
10937 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
10938 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
10939 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO. The
10940 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
10941 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i. If the code is
10942 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
10943 for the entire installation.
</p
>
10945 <p
>I
've implemented this in the
10946 <a href=
"https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install
">debian-edu-install
</a
>
10947 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
10948 Debian Edu installation. If you want to test this yourself, you can
10949 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb). One shell script
10950 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:
</p
>
10952 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
10955 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
10957 logger -t my-pkgsel
"info: $*
"
10960 logger -t my-pkgsel
"error: $*
"
10962 override_install() {
10963 apt-install eatmydata || true
10964 if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
10965 for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
10967 # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
10968 if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
10969 info
"diverting $file using eatmydata
"
10970 printf
"#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \
"\$@\
"\n
" \
10971 > /target$file.edu
10972 chmod
755 /target$file.edu
10973 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
10974 --rename --quiet --add $file
10975 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
10977 error
"unable to divert $file, as it is missing.
"
10981 error
"unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage
"
10986 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
10988 <p
>To clean up, another shell script should go into
10989 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
10991 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
10993 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
10995 logger -t my-finish-install
"error: $@
"
10997 remove_install_override() {
10998 for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
11000 if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
11002 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
11003 --rename --quiet --remove $file
11004 rm /target$file.edu
11006 error
"Missing divert for $file.
"
11009 sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
11012 remove_install_override
11013 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
11015 <p
>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
11016 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
11017 finish-install.d scripts.
</p
>
11019 <p
>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
11020 Debian installer too? I suspect it should, but am not sure the
11021 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough. It also
11022 depend on the side effects of the change. I
'm not aware of any, but I
11023 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
11024 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
11025 fsync() having effect? Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
11026 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
11027 everyone.
</p
>
11029 <p
>Update
2014-
09-
24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
11030 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
11031 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
702711">bug #
702711</a
>. An updated
11032 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.
</p
>
11034 <p
>Update
2014-
10-
17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
11035 the optimization work again. And I have discovered that the
11036 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
11037 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package. See
11038 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.
</p
>
11040 <p
>Update
2014-
11-
11: Unfortunately, a new
11041 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
765738">bug #
765738</a
> in eatmydata only
11042 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
11043 optimization again. If
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
768893">unblock
11044 request
768893</a
> is accepted, it should be working again.
</p
>
11049 <title>Good bye subkeys.pgp.net, welcome pool.sks-keyservers.net
</title>
11050 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_bye_subkeys_pgp_net__welcome_pool_sks_keyservers_net.html
</link>
11051 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_bye_subkeys_pgp_net__welcome_pool_sks_keyservers_net.html
</guid>
11052 <pubDate>Wed,
10 Sep
2014 13:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11053 <description><p
>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
11054 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">Norwegian Unix User Group
</a
> about
11055 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20140909-sks-keyservers/
">the
11056 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net
</a
>, and was very happy to
11057 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
11058 use when looking for peoples public key. So far I have used
11059 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
11060 were misbehaving, but those days are ended. The servers I have used
11061 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable. I hope
11062 those problems are gone now.
</p
>
11064 <p
>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
11065 <a href=
"https://sks-keyservers.net/
">sks-keyservers.net
</a
> service
11066 there is a pool of more than
100 keyservers which are checked every
11067 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date. It must be
11068 better than what I have used so far. :)
</p
>
11070 <p
>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
11071 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
11072 not seem to be used in Debian. Perhaps it should?
</p
>
11074 <p
>Anyway, I
've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
11077 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
11078 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
11079 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
11081 <p
>With GnuPG version
2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
11082 entries in DNS. Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
11083 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
11084 keyserver automatically should their need it:
</p
>
11086 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
11087 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
11088 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record
0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
11090 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
11092 <p
>Now if only
11093 <a href=
"http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/
">the
11094 HKP lookup protocol
</a
> supported finding signature paths, I would be
11095 very happy. It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
11096 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
11097 another key. Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
11098 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
11099 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
11100 This is as far as I can tell not possible today. Perhaps something
11101 for a future version of the protocol?
</p
>
11106 <title>Do you need an agreement with MPEG-LA to publish and broadcast H
.264 video in Norway?
</title>
11107 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Do_you_need_an_agreement_with_MPEG_LA_to_publish_and_broadcast_H_264_video_in_Norway_.html
</link>
11108 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Do_you_need_an_agreement_with_MPEG_LA_to_publish_and_broadcast_H_264_video_in_Norway_.html
</guid>
11109 <pubDate>Mon,
25 Aug
2014 22:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11110 <description><p
>Two years later, I am still not sure if it is legal here in Norway
11111 to use or publish a video in H
.264 or MPEG4 format edited by the
11112 commercially licensed video editors, without limiting the use to
11113 create
"personal
" or
"non-commercial
" videos or get a license
11114 agreement with
<a href=
"http://www.mpegla.com
">MPEG LA
</a
>. If one
11115 want to publish and broadcast video in a non-personal or commercial
11116 setting, it might be that those tools can not be used, or that video
11117 format can not be used, without breaking their copyright license. I
11119 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Trenger_en_avtale_med_MPEG_LA_for___publisere_og_kringkaste_H_264_video_.html
">Back
11120 then
</a
>, I found that the copyright license terms for Adobe Premiere
11121 and Apple Final Cut Pro both specified that one could not use the
11122 program to produce anything else without a patent license from MPEG
11123 LA. The issue is not limited to those two products, though. Other
11124 much used products like those from Avid and Sorenson Media have terms
11125 of use are similar to those from Adobe and Apple. The complicating
11126 factor making me unsure if those terms have effect in Norway or not is
11127 that the patents in question are not valid in Norway, but copyright
11128 licenses are.
</p
>
11130 <p
>These are the terms for Avid Artist Suite, according to their
11131 <a href=
"http://www.avid.com/US/about-avid/legal-notices/legal-enduserlicense2
">published
11133 <a href=
"http://www.avid.com/static/resources/common/documents/corporate/LICENSE.pdf
">license
11134 text
</a
> (converted to lower case text for easier reading):
</p
>
11136 <p
><blockquote
>
11137 <p
>18.2. MPEG-
4. MPEG-
4 technology may be included with the
11138 software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:
</p
>
11140 <p
>This product is licensed under the MPEG-
4 visual patent portfolio
11141 license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i)
11142 encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-
4 visual standard (“MPEG-
4
11143 video”) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-
4 video that was encoded by a
11144 consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was
11145 obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-
4
11146 video. No license is granted or shall be implied for any other
11147 use. Additional information including that relating to promotional,
11148 internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG
11149 LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com. This product is licensed under
11150 the MPEG-
4 systems patent portfolio license for encoding in compliance
11151 with the MPEG-
4 systems standard, except that an additional license
11152 and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with
11153 (i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a
11154 title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by
11155 title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage
11156 and/or use, such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA,
11157 LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.
</p
>
11159 <p
>18.3. H
.264/AVC. H
.264/AVC technology may be included with the
11160 software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:
</p
>
11162 <p
>This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
11163 the personal use of a consumer or other uses in which it does not
11164 receive remuneration to (i) encode video in compliance with the AVC
11165 standard (“AVC video”) and/or (ii) decode AVC video that was encoded
11166 by a consumer engaged in a personal activity and/or was obtained from
11167 a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted
11168 or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information may be
11169 obtained from MPEG LA, L.L.C. See http://www.mpegla.com.
</p
>
11170 </blockquote
></p
>
11172 <p
>Note the requirement that the videos created can only be used for
11173 personal or non-commercial purposes.
</p
>
11175 <p
>The Sorenson Media software have
11176 <a href=
"http://www.sorensonmedia.com/terms/
">similar terms
</a
>:
</p
>
11178 <p
><blockquote
>
11180 <p
>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-
4 Video
11181 Decoders and/or Encoders: Any such product is licensed under the
11182 MPEG-
4 visual patent portfolio license for the personal and
11183 non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance
11184 with the MPEG-
4 visual standard (“MPEG-
4 video”) and/or (ii) decoding
11185 MPEG-
4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and
11186 non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider
11187 licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-
4 video. No license is granted or
11188 shall be implied for any other use. Additional information including
11189 that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and
11190 licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See
11191 http://www.mpegla.com.
</p
>
11193 <p
>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-
4
11194 Consumer Recorded Data Encoder, MPEG-
4 Systems Internet Data Encoder,
11195 MPEG-
4 Mobile Data Encoder, and/or MPEG-
4 Unique Use Encoder: Any such
11196 product is licensed under the MPEG-
4 systems patent portfolio license
11197 for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-
4 systems standard, except
11198 that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for
11199 encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical
11200 media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data
11201 which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an
11202 end user for permanent storage and/or use. Such additional license may
11203 be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for
11204 additional details.
</p
>
11206 </blockquote
></p
>
11208 <p
>Some free software like
11209 <a href=
"https://handbrake.fr/
">Handbrake
</A
> and
11210 <a href=
"http://ffmpeg.org/
">FFMPEG
</a
> uses GPL/LGPL licenses and do
11211 not have any such terms included, so for those, there is no
11212 requirement to limit the use to personal and non-commercial.
</p
>
11217 <title>Debian Edu interview: Bernd Zeitzen
</title>
11218 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html
</link>
11219 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html
</guid>
11220 <pubDate>Thu,
31 Jul
2014 08:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11221 <description><p
>The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
11222 schools,
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
11223 Skolelinux
</a
>, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
11224 involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
11225 from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
11226 the setup. I managed to interview him this summer.
</p
>
11228 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
11230 <p
>My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I
'm married with Hedda, a self
11231 employed physiotherapist. My former profession is tool maker, but I
11232 haven
't worked for
30 years in this job.
30 years ago I started to
11233 support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
11234 administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
11235 Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
11236 Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
11237 works with Windows . :-(
</p
>
11239 <p
>In
1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
11240 Windows
98,
2000, XP, …,
8, Ubuntu, MacOSX. Today we are running a
11241 Linux server with
6 Windows clients and
10 persons (teacher of
11242 children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
11243 psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
11244 work with the documentations of our patients.
</p
>
11246 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
11247 project?
</strong
></p
>
11249 <p
>Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
11250 his school (
<a href=
"http://www.gymnasium-harsewinkel.de/
">Gymnasium
11251 Harsewinkel
</a
>). They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
11252 were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
11253 software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
11254 computer skills in optional lessons. I
'm spending
4-
6 hours a week
11255 with this job.
</p
>
11257 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
11258 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
11260 <p
>The independence.
</p
>
11262 <p
>First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
11263 software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
11264 included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.
</p
>
11266 <p
>Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
11267 possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices. The
11268 servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
11269 working reliable.
</p
>
11271 <p
>We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server),
45
11272 workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
11273 solution for all classrooms. These machines are all booting from the
11274 terminal server. In the moment we are installing
30 laptops as mobile
11275 workstations. Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
11276 machines in their classrooms. Internet access is realized by a WLAN
11277 router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
11278 dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.
</p
>
11280 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
11281 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
11283 <p
>Teachers and pupils are Windows users.
&lt;Irony on
&gt; And Linux
11284 isn
't cool. It
's software for freaks using the command line.
&lt;Irony
11285 off
&gt; They don
't realize the stability of the system.
</p
>
11287 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
11289 <p
>Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server
12.04 (Samba,
11290 Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, … and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)
</p
>
11292 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
11293 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
11295 <p
>In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
11296 which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
11297 teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
11298 Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
11299 Office. They don
't know about the possibility to use Free Software
11300 instead. Another problem are the publisher of school books. They
11301 develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.
</p
>
11306 <title>98.6 percent done with the Norwegian draft translation of Free Culture
</title>
11307 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/
98_6_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html
</link>
11308 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/
98_6_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html
</guid>
11309 <pubDate>Wed,
23 Jul
2014 22:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11310 <description><p
>This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian
11311 <a href=
"http://www.docbook.org/
">docbook
</a
> version of the
2004 book
11312 <a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
> by Lawrence Lessig,
11313 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright
11314 law. Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text. There
11315 are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page
11316 need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be
11317 translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof
11318 reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations
11319 need to be cleaned up. The work stopped up because I had to give
11320 priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of
11321 the translation show this very well:
</p
>
11323 <p
><img width=
"80%
" align=
"center
" src=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png
"></p
>
11325 <p
>If you want to read the result, check out the
11326 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>
11327 project pages and the
11328 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true
">PDF
</a
>,
11329 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true
">EPUB
</a
>
11330 and HTML version available in the
11331 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive
">archive
11332 directory
</a
>.
</p
>
11334 <p
>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
11335 you find any.
</p
>
11340 <title>From English wiki to translated PDF and epub via Docbook
</title>
11341 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html
</link>
11342 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html
</guid>
11343 <pubDate>Tue,
17 Jun
2014 11:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11344 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
11345 project
</a
> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
11346 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
11347 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation. This text is about how the
11348 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.
</p
>
11350 <p
>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
11351 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
11352 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
11353 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
11354 in sync. And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
11355 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
11356 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
11357 edit the documentation using a web browser. We also want it to be
11358 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
11359 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
11360 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
11363 <p
>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
11364 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/
">Debian
11365 wiki
</a
>, as several wiki pages written in English. It consist of one
11366 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
11367 for each chapter, and finally one
"collection page
" gluing all the
11368 chapters together into one large web page (aka
11369 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne
">the
11370 AllInOne page
</a
>). The AllInOne page is the one used for further
11371 processing and translations. Thanks to the fact that the
11372 <a href=
"http://moinmo.in/
">MoinMoin
</a
> installation on
11373 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
11374 <a href=
"http://www.docbook.org/
">the Docbook format
</a
>, we can fetch
11375 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
11376 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
11377 manual. This process also download images and transform image
11378 references to use the locally downloaded images. The generated
11379 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
11380 using the
<tt
>documentation/scripts/get_manual
</tt
> program, and the
11381 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
11382 a handfull of images. The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
11383 and epub versions of the English manual. This is the basic step of
11384 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
11385 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
11386 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.
</p
>
11388 <p
>But English documentation is not enough for us. We want translated
11389 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
11390 track the English original. For this we use the
11391 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html
">poxml
</a
> package,
11392 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
11393 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
11394 translation tools used by those translating free software. The pot
11395 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
11396 files), which the translations update with the native language
11397 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
11398 original. The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
11399 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
11400 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
11401 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml). This translated (or partly
11402 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
11403 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
11404 of the documentation.
</p
>
11406 <p
>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files. We
11408 <a href=
"http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/
">lokalize
</a
>,
11409 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
11410 <a href=
"http://pootle.translatehouse.org/
">Poodle
</a
> or
11411 <a href=
"https://www.transifex.com/
">Transifex
</a
>. All we care about
11412 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository. Updated
11413 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
11414 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc
">bug reports
11415 against the debian-edu-doc package
</a
>.
</p
>
11417 <p
>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
11418 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
11419 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
11420 this regard). For this we transform the original PNG images to the
11421 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
11422 translated images by storing translated versions in
11423 images/$LANGUAGECODE/. I am a bit unsure about the details here. The
11424 package maintainers know more.
</p
>
11426 <p
>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
11427 <a href=
"http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/
">the content
11428 of the documentation packages on the web
</a
>. See for example the
11429 <a href=
"http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf
">Italian
11430 PDF version
</a
> or the
11431 <a href=
"http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html
">German
11432 HTML version
</a
>. We do not yet build the epub version by default,
11433 but perhaps it will be done in the future.
</p
>
11435 <p
>To learn more, check out
11436 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html
">the
11437 debian-edu-doc package
</a
>,
11438 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/
">the
11439 manual on the wiki
</a
> and
11440 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations
">the
11441 translation instructions
</a
> in the manual.
</p
>
11446 <title>Free software car computer solution?
</title>
11447 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html
</link>
11448 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html
</guid>
11449 <pubDate>Thu,
29 May
2014 18:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11450 <description><p
>Dear lazyweb. I
'm planning to set up a small Raspberry Pi computer
11451 in my car, connected to
11452 <a href=
"http://www.dx.com/p/
400a-
4-
0-tft-lcd-digital-monitor-for-vehicle-parking-reverse-camera-
1440x272-
12v-dc-
57776">a
11453 small screen
</a
> next to the rear mirror. I plan to hook it up with a
11454 GPS and a USB wifi card too. The idea is to get my own
11455 "<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carputer
">Carputer
</a
>". But I
11456 wonder if someone already created a good free software solution for
11457 such car computer.
</p
>
11459 <p
>This is my current wish list for such system:
</p
>
11463 <li
>Work on Raspberry Pi.
</li
>
11465 <li
>Show current speed limit based on location, and warn if going too
11466 fast (for example using color codes yellow and red on the screen,
11467 or make a sound). This could be done either using either data from
11468 <a href=
"http://www.openstreetmap.org/
">Openstreetmap
</a
> or OCR
11469 info gathered from a dashboard camera.
</li
>
11471 <li
>Track automatic toll road passes and their cost, show total spent
11472 and make it possible to calculate toll costs for planned
11475 <li
>Collect GPX tracks for use with OpenStreetMap.
</li
>
11477 <li
>Automatically detect and use any wireless connection to connect
11478 to home server. Try IP over DNS
11479 (
<a href=
"http://dev.kryo.se/iodine/
">iodine
</a
>) or ICMP
11480 (
<a href=
"http://code.gerade.org/hans/
">Hans
</a
>) if direct
11481 connection do not work.
</li
>
11483 <li
>Set up mesh network to talk to other cars with the same system,
11484 or some standard car mesh protocol.
</li
>
11486 <li
>Warn when approaching speed cameras and speed camera ranges
11487 (speed calculated between two cameras).
</li
>
11489 <li
>Suport dashboard/front facing camera to discover speed limits and
11490 run OCR to track registration number of passing cars.
</li
>
11494 <p
>If you know of any free software car computer system supporting
11495 some or all of these features, please let me know.
</p
>
11500 <title>Half the Coverity issues in Gnash fixed in the next release
</title>
11501 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_the_Coverity_issues_in_Gnash_fixed_in_the_next_release.html
</link>
11502 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_the_Coverity_issues_in_Gnash_fixed_in_the_next_release.html
</guid>
11503 <pubDate>Tue,
29 Apr
2014 14:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11504 <description><p
>I
've been following
<a href=
"http://www.getgnash.org/
">the Gnash
11505 project
</a
> for quite a while now. It is a free software
11506 implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser
11507 plugin. Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the
11508 newer AVM2 format - see
11509 <a href=
"http://lightspark.github.io/
">Lightspark
</a
> for that one),
11510 allowing several flash based sites to work. Thanks to the friendly
11511 developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the
11512 Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to
11513 those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2
11514 support, but it has not happened yet. If you install both Lightspark
11515 and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file,
11516 so you can get both handled as free software. Unfortunately,
11517 Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many
11518 sites do not work yet.
</p
>
11520 <p
>A few months ago, I started looking at
11521 <a href=
"http://scan.coverity.com/
">Coverity
</a
>, the static source
11522 checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks
11523 to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the
11524 company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of
11525 the projects I decided to check out. Coverity is able to find lock
11526 errors, memory errors, dead code and more. A few days ago they even
11527 extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
11528 There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the
11529 amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static
11530 code checkers I have tested over the years.
</p
>
11532 <p
>Since a few weeks ago, I
've been working with the other Gnash
11533 developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity. I was quite happy
11534 today when I checked the current status and saw that of the
777 issues
11535 detected so far,
374 are marked as fixed. This make me confident that
11536 the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than
11537 the previous one. Most of the reported issues were and are in the
11538 test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code.
</p
>
11540 <p
>If you want to help out, you find us on
11541 <a href=
"https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev
">the
11542 gnash-dev mailing list
</a
> and on
11543 <a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnash
">the #gnash channel on
11544 irc.freenode.net IRC server
</a
>.
</p
>
11549 <title>Install hardware dependent packages using tasksel (Isenkram
0.7)
</title>
11550 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Install_hardware_dependent_packages_using_tasksel__Isenkram_0_7_.html
</link>
11551 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Install_hardware_dependent_packages_using_tasksel__Isenkram_0_7_.html
</guid>
11552 <pubDate>Wed,
23 Apr
2014 14:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11553 <description><p
>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
11554 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
11555 So I implemented one, using
11556 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram
">my Isenkram
11557 package
</a
>. To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
11558 run tasksel as user root. You should be presented with a new option,
11559 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
". When you
11560 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
11561 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.
<p
>
11563 <p
>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
11564 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
11565 packages to install. The first part is in
11566 <tt
>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc
</tt
> and look like
11569 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
11572 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
11573 Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
11575 Test-new-install: mark show
11577 Packages: for-current-hardware
11578 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
11580 <p
>The second part is in
11581 <tt
>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware
</tt
> and look like
11584 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
11589 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
11591 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
11593 <p
>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
11594 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
11595 have installed on our machines. I
've not been able to find a way to
11596 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
11597 before doing the installation. So if you are curious or careful,
11598 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.
</p
>
11600 <p
>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
11601 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
11602 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
11603 database (using the Modaliases header). The APT package database
11604 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
11605 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
719837">#
719837</a
> and
11606 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
730704">#
730704</a
>). The cause is in
11607 the python-apt code (bug
11608 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
745487">#
745487</a
>), but using a
11609 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
11610 reduce the memory leak from ~
30 MiB per hardware detection down to
11611 around
2 MiB per hardware detection. It should make the desktop
11612 daemon a lot more useful. The fix is in version
0.7 uploaded to
11613 unstable today.
</p
>
11615 <p
>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
11616 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
11617 use the AppStream data source for this. A proposal for getting proper
11618 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
11619 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-
11">DEP-
11</a
>, and
11620 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects
.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream
.2FDEP-
11_for_the_Debian_Archive
">GSoC
11621 project
</a
> will take place this summer to improve the situation. I
11622 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
11623 start using the information when it is ready.
</p
>
11625 <p
>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
11626 add a
"Xb-Modaliases
" header to your control file like I did in
11627 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile
">the pymissile
11628 package
</a
> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
11630 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/
">all my
11631 blog posts tagged isenkram
</a
> for details on the notation. I expect
11632 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
11633 moment I got no better place to store it.
</p
>
11638 <title>FreedomBox milestone - all packages now in Debian Sid
</title>
11639 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html
</link>
11640 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html
</guid>
11641 <pubDate>Tue,
15 Apr
2014 22:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11642 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
">Freedombox
11643 project
</a
> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
11644 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
11645 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
11646 encrypted and away from prying eyes. It is still going strong, and
11647 today a major mile stone was reached.
</p
>
11649 <p
>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
11650 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable. It was
11651 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
11652 during build and on the first boot. Now all one need to get going is
11653 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
11654 Debian. And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
11655 build everything directly from Debian. :)
</p
>
11657 <p
>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
11658 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup
">freedombox-setup
</a
>,
11659 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth
">plinth
</a
>,
11660 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite
">pagekite
</a
>,
11661 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor
">tor
</a
>,
11662 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy
">privoxy
</a
>,
11663 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud
">owncloud
</a
> and
11664 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq
">dnsmasq
</a
>. There
11665 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup. User
11666 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki. Please
11667 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie
">check out
11668 the manual
</a
> and help us improve it.
</p
>
11670 <p
>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
11671 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
11672 become root:
</p
>
11674 <p
><pre
>
11675 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
11676 mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
11678 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
11680 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
11681 </pre
></p
>
11683 <p
>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
11684 devices. See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
11685 details on the build. If you do not want all three images, trim the
11686 make line. Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
11687 virtualbox specific. It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
11688 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment. You might need
11689 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
11690 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.
</p
>
11692 <p
>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
11693 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
11694 the preseed values:
</p
>
11696 <p
><pre
>
11697 url=
<a href=
"http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat
">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat
</a
>
11698 </pre
></p
>
11700 <p
>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
11701 it still work.
</p
>
11703 <p
>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
11704 systemd as the boot system. It will become the default for Linux in
11705 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox. I did
11706 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
11707 during boot when using systemd. I suspect there are other problems
11708 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
11709 be run from the plinth web interface.
</p
>
11711 <p
>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
11712 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
11713 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org:
6667/%
23freedombox
">IRC (#freedombox on
11714 irc.debian.org)
</a
> and
11715 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
">the
11716 mailing list
</a
> if you want to help make this vision come true.
</p
>
11721 <title>S3QL, a locally mounted cloud file system - nice free software
</title>
11722 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html
</link>
11723 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html
</guid>
11724 <pubDate>Wed,
9 Apr
2014 11:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11725 <description><p
>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
11726 solution for use at home. My requirements are simple, it must be
11727 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
11728 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
11729 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
11730 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
11731 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
11732 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space. On top
11733 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
11734 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage. But
11735 I never found time to implement such system. But the last few weeks I
11736 have looked at a system called
11737 <a href=
"https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/
">S3QL
</a
>, a locally
11738 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.
</p
>
11740 <p
>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
11741 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
11742 Google Drive or OpenStack API. There are heaps of such storage
11743 providers. S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
11744 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server. S3QL
11745 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
11746 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
11747 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
11748 while the content is stored in the cloud as well. This allow me to
11749 have a backup that should survive fire. The file system can not be
11750 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
11751 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
11752 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.
</p
>
11754 <p
>It is simple to use. I
'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
11755 package is included already. So to get started, run
<tt
>apt-get
11756 install s3ql
</tt
>. Next, pick a storage provider. I ended up picking
11757 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
11758 <a href=
"https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/
44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy
">how
11759 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service
</a
>, because I trust the laws
11760 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
11761 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
11762 in Iceland. Another nice recipe is available from the article
11763 <a href=
"http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage
">S3QL
11764 Filesystem for HPC Storage
</a
> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
11765 Admin magazine. When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
11766 the API key needed to connect to the storage API. With Greencloud,
11767 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
11770 <p
>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
11771 system. First, create a new bucket in the cloud. This bucket is the
11772 file system storage area. I picked a bucket name reflecting the
11773 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
11774 I
'll refer to it as
<tt
>bucket-name
</tt
> below. In addition, one need
11775 the API login and password, and a locally created password. Store it
11776 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
11778 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
11780 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:
443/bucket-name
11781 backend-login: API-login
11782 backend-password: API-password
11783 fs-passphrase: local-password
11784 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
11786 <p
>I create my local passphrase using
<tt
>pwget
50</tt
> or similar,
11787 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
11788 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
11789 details and password to create it:
</p
>
11791 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
11792 # mkdir -m
700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
11793 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
11794 --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:
443/bucket-name
11795 Enter backend login:
11796 Enter backend password:
11797 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user
's guide, especially
11798 the
'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data
' section.
11799 Enter encryption password:
11800 Confirm encryption password:
11801 Generating random encryption key...
11802 Creating metadata tables...
11803 Dumping metadata...
11808 ..symlink_targets..
11812 Compressing and uploading metadata...
11813 Wrote
0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
11814 #
</pre
></blockquote
></p
>
11816 <p
>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
11818 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
11819 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
11820 --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:
443/bucket-name /s3ql
11821 Using
4 upload threads.
11822 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
11823 Reading metadata...
11828 ..symlink_targets..
11832 Mounting filesystem...
11834 Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
11835 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:
443/bucket-name
1.0T
0 1.0T
0% /s3ql
11837 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
11839 <p
>The file system is now ready for use. I use rsync to store my
11840 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
11841 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
11842 running rsync. To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
11843 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
11844 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
11846 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
11847 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
11849 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
11851 <p
>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
11852 correct any problems detected. This can be used if the local server
11853 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the
"already
11854 mounted
" flag. This is what it look like when processing a working
11855 file system:
</p
>
11857 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
11858 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:
443/bucket-name
11859 Using cached metadata.
11860 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
11861 Checking DB integrity...
11862 Creating temporary extra indices...
11863 Checking lost+found...
11864 Checking cached objects...
11865 Checking names (refcounts)...
11866 Checking contents (names)...
11867 Checking contents (inodes)...
11868 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
11869 Checking objects (reference counts)...
11870 Checking objects (backend)...
11871 ..processed
5000 objects so far..
11872 ..processed
10000 objects so far..
11873 ..processed
15000 objects so far..
11874 Checking objects (sizes)...
11875 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
11876 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
11877 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
11878 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
11879 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
11880 Checking inodes (sizes)...
11881 Checking extended attributes (names)...
11882 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
11883 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
11884 Checking directory reachability...
11885 Checking unix conventions...
11886 Checking referential integrity...
11887 Dropping temporary indices...
11888 Backing up old metadata...
11889 Dumping metadata...
11894 ..symlink_targets..
11898 Compressing and uploading metadata...
11899 Wrote
0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
11901 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
11903 <p
>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
11904 quick, about the same speed as local file access. Uploading large
11905 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
11906 house. Uploading
685 MiB with a
100 MiB cache gave me
305 kiB/s,
11907 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
11908 Debian installation ISO gave me
610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
11909 Both were measured using
<tt
>dd
</tt
>. So for me, the bottleneck is my
11910 network, not the file system code. I do not know what a good cache
11911 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
11912 working set.
</p
>
11914 <p
>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
11915 time. If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
11918 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
11919 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
11920 --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:
443/bucket-name /s3ql
11921 Using
8 upload threads.
11922 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
11924 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
11926 <p
>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
11927 metadata is uploaded once every
24 hour by default. To ensure the
11928 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
11929 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
11932 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
11933 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
11934 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
11936 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
11938 <p
>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
11939 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
11940 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
11941 a report:
</p
>
11943 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
11945 Directory entries:
9141
11948 Total data size:
22049.38 MB
11949 After de-duplication:
21955.46 MB (
99.57% of total)
11950 After compression:
21877.28 MB (
99.22% of total,
99.64% of de-duplicated)
11951 Database size:
2.39 MB (uncompressed)
11952 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
11954 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
11956 <p
>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
11957 storage. I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
11958 <a href=
"https://www.greenqloud.com/
">Greenqloud
</a
>,
11959 <a href=
"http://drive.google.com/
">Google Drive
</a
>,
11960 <a href=
"http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
">Amazon S3 web serivces
</a
>,
11961 <a href=
"http://www.rackspace.com/
">Rackspace
</a
> and
11962 <a href=
"http://crowncloud.net/
">Crowncloud
</A
>. The latter even
11963 accept payment in Bitcoin. Pick one that suit your need. Some of
11964 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
11965 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
11968 <p
>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
11969 and posters discussing the S3QL file system. There are several, which
11970 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
11971 science community and increased my confidence in using it. One nice
11973 "<a href=
"http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf
">An
11974 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
11975 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach
</a
>" by Hsing-Bung
11976 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
11977 and Pamela Smith. Please have a look.
</p
>
11979 <p
>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
11980 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
11981 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
11982 it come to locking and umask handling etc). Running
11983 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html
">my
11984 test code to check file system semantics
</a
>, I was happy to discover that
11985 no error was found. So the file system can be used for home
11986 directories, if one chooses to do so.
</p
>
11988 <p
>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
11989 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
11990 <a href=
"http://www.tarsnap.com/
">Tarsnap service
</a
>, which also
11991 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client. It have
11992 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
11993 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
11994 only read from it.
</p
>
11996 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
11997 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
11998 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
12003 <title>ReactOS Windows clone - nice free software
</title>
12004 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ReactOS_Windows_clone___nice_free_software.html
</link>
12005 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ReactOS_Windows_clone___nice_free_software.html
</guid>
12006 <pubDate>Tue,
1 Apr
2014 12:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
12007 <description><p
>Microsoft have announced that Windows XP reaches its end of life
12008 2014-
04-
08, in
7 days. But there are heaps of machines still running
12009 Windows XP, and depending on Windows XP to run their applications, and
12010 upgrading will be expensive, both when it comes to money and when it
12011 comes to the amount of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP to a
12012 new operating system. Some obvious options (buy new a Windows
12013 machine, buy a MacOSX machine, install Linux on the existing machine)
12014 are already well known and covered elsewhere. Most of them involve
12015 leaving the user applications installed on Windows XP behind and
12016 trying out replacements or updated versions. In this blog post I want
12017 to mention one strange bird that allow people to keep the hardware and
12018 the existing Windows XP applications and run them on a free software
12019 operating system that is Windows XP compatible.
</p
>
12021 <p
><a href=
"http://www.reactos.org/
">ReactOS
</a
> is a free software
12022 operating system (GNU GPL licensed) working on providing a operating
12023 system that is binary compatible with Windows, able to run windows
12024 programs directly and to use Windows drivers for hardware directly.
12025 The project goal is for Windows user to keep their existing machines,
12026 drivers and software, and gain the advantages from user a operating
12027 system without usage limitations caused by non-free licensing. It is
12028 a Windows clone running directly on the hardware, so quite different
12029 from the approach taken by
<a href=
"http://www.winehq.org/
">the Wine
12030 project
</a
>, which make it possible to run Windows binaries on
12033 <p
>The ReactOS project share code with the Wine project, so most
12034 shared libraries available on Windows are already implemented already.
12035 There is also a software manager like the one we are used to on Linux,
12036 allowing the user to install free software applications with a simple
12037 click directly from the Internet. Check out the
12038 <a href=
"http://www.reactos.org/screenshots
">screen shots on the
12039 project web site
</a
> for an idea what it look like (it looks just like
12040 Windows before metro).
</p
>
12042 <p
>I do not use ReactOS myself, preferring Linux and Unix like
12043 operating systems. I
've tested it, and it work fine in a virt-manager
12044 virtual machine. The browser, minesweeper, notepad etc is working
12045 fine as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, my main test application
12046 is the software included on a CD with the Lego Mindstorms NXT, which
12047 seem to install just fine from CD but fail to leave any binaries on
12048 the disk after the installation. So no luck with that test software.
12049 No idea why, but hope someone else figure out and fix the problem.
12050 I
've tried the ReactOS Live ISO on a physical machine, and it seemed
12051 to work just fine. If you like Windows and want to keep running your
12052 old Windows binaries, check it out by
12053 <a href=
"http://www.reactos.org/download
">downloading
</a
> the
12054 installation CD, the live CD or the preinstalled virtual machine
12060 <title>Debian Edu interview: Roger Marsal
</title>
12061 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html
</link>
12062 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html
</guid>
12063 <pubDate>Sun,
30 Mar
2014 11:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
12064 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>
12065 keep gaining new users. Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
12066 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu
">#debian-edu
</a
>, with a
12067 wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
12068 contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.
</p
>
12070 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
12072 <p
>My name is Roger Marsal, I
'm
27 years old (
1986 generation) and I
12073 live in Barcelona, Spain. I
've got a strong business background and I
12074 work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent. Additionally,
12075 I
've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
12076 last development phase of a new social networking concept.
</p
>
12078 <p
>I
'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
12079 ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
12080 and as a necessary step to gain expertise.
</p
>
12082 <p
>In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
12083 can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
12086 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
12087 project?
</strong
></p
>
12089 <p
>I discovered the
<a href=
"http://www.ltsp.org/
">LTSP
</a
> advantages
12090 with
"Ubuntu
12.04 alternate install
" and after a year of use I
12091 started looking for an alternative. Even though I highly value and
12092 respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
12093 change to a more robust and stable alternative. As far as I was using
12094 Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
12095 Debian and configure an LTSP server myself. Surprised, I discovered
12096 that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
12097 and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
12098 running. I just loved it.
</p
>
12100 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
12101 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
12103 <p
>I found a main advantage in that, once you know
"the tips and
12104 tricks
", a new installation just works out of the box. It
's the most
12105 complete alternative I
've found to create an LTSP network. All the
12106 other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
12107 be made of steel.
</p
>
12109 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
12110 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
12112 <p
>I found two main disadvantages.
</p
>
12114 <p
>I
'm not an expert but I
've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
12115 amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I
'm quite
12116 stubborn and I just worked until I did but I
'm sure many people with few
12117 resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
12118 or dropped.
</p
>
12120 <p
>It
's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
12121 this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
12122 more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
12123 discourage many people too.
</p
>
12125 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
12127 <p
>I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
12128 Virtualbox.
</p
>
12131 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12132 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
12134 <p
>I don
't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
12135 attribute in both
"freedom
" and
"no price
" meanings is what will
12136 really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
12137 the
<a href=
"http://www.r-project.org/
">"R
" statistical language
</a
>; a
12138 few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
12139 Today it
's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
12140 different level of studies. I believe free and open software will
12141 increasingly gain popularity, but I
'm sure schools will be one of the
12142 first scenarios where this will happen.
</p
>
12147 <title>Public Trusted Timestamping services for everyone
</title>
12148 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html
</link>
12149 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html
</guid>
12150 <pubDate>Tue,
25 Mar
2014 12:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
12151 <description><p
>Did you ever need to store logs or other files in a way that would
12152 allow it to be used as evidence in court, and needed a way to
12153 demonstrate without reasonable doubt that the file had not been
12154 changed since it was created? Or, did you ever need to document that
12155 a given document was received at some point in time, like some
12156 archived document or the answer to an exam, and not changed after it
12157 was received? The problem in these settings is to remove the need to
12158 trust yourself and your computers, while still being able to prove
12159 that a file is the same as it was at some given time in the past.
</p
>
12161 <p
>A solution to these problems is to have a trusted third party
12162 "stamp
" the document and verify that at some given time the document
12163 looked a given way. Such
12164 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notarius
">notarius
</a
> service
12165 have been around for thousands of years, and its digital equivalent is
12167 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping
">trusted
12168 timestamping service
</a
>.
<a href=
"http://www.ietf.org/
">The Internet
12169 Engineering Task Force
</a
> standardised how such service could work a
12170 few years ago as
<a href=
"http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161
">RFC
12171 3161</a
>. The mechanism is simple. Create a hash of the file in
12172 question, send it to a trusted third party which add a time stamp to
12173 the hash and sign the result with its private key, and send back the
12174 signed hash + timestamp. Both email, FTP and HTTP can be used to
12175 request such signature, depending on what is provided by the service
12176 used. Anyone with the document and the signature can then verify that
12177 the document matches the signature by creating their own hash and
12178 checking the signature using the trusted third party public key.
12179 There are several commercial services around providing such
12180 timestamping. A quick search for
12181 "<a href=
"https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rfc+
3161+service
">rfc
3161
12182 service
</a
>" pointed me to at least
12183 <a href=
"https://www.digistamp.com/technical/how-a-digital-time-stamp-works/
">DigiStamp
</a
>,
12184 <a href=
"http://www.quovadisglobal.co.uk/CertificateServices/SigningServices/TimeStamp.aspx
">Quo
12186 <a href=
"https://www.globalsign.com/timestamp-service/
">Global Sign
</a
>
12187 and
<a href=
"http://www.globaltrustfinder.com/TSADefault.aspx
">Global
12188 Trust Finder
</a
>. The system work as long as the private key of the
12189 trusted third party is not compromised.
</p
>
12191 <p
>But as far as I can tell, there are very few public trusted
12192 timestamp services available for everyone. I
've been looking for one
12193 for a while now. But yesterday I found one over at
12194 <a href=
"https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/
">Deutches
12195 Forschungsnetz
</a
> mentioned in
12196 <a href=
"http://www.d-mueller.de/blog/dealing-with-trusted-timestamps-in-php-rfc-
3161/
">a
12197 blog by David Müller
</a
>. I then found
12198 <a href=
"http://www.rz.uni-greifswald.de/support/dfn-pki-zertifikate/zeitstempeldienst.html
">a
12199 good recipe on how to use the service
</a
> over at the University of
12200 Greifswald.
</p
>
12202 <p
><a href=
"http://www.openssl.org/
">The OpenSSL library
</a
> contain
12203 both server and tools to use and set up your own signing service. See
12204 the ts(
1SSL), tsget(
1SSL) manual pages for more details. The
12205 following shell script demonstrate how to extract a signed timestamp
12206 for any file on the disk in a Debian environment:
</p
>
12208 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
12211 url=
"http://zeitstempel.dfn.de
"
12212 caurl=
"https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
"
12213 reqfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsq)
12214 resfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsr)
12216 if [ ! -f $cafile ] ; then
12217 wget -O $cafile
"$caurl
"
12219 openssl ts -query -data
"$
1" -cert | tee
"$reqfile
" \
12220 | /usr/lib/ssl/misc/tsget -h
"$url
" -o
"$resfile
"
12221 openssl ts -reply -in
"$resfile
" -text
1>&2
12222 openssl ts -verify -data
"$
1" -in
"$resfile
" -CAfile
"$cafile
" 1>&2
12223 base64
< "$resfile
"
12224 rm
"$reqfile
" "$resfile
"
12225 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
12227 <p
>The argument to the script is the file to timestamp, and the output
12228 is a base64 encoded version of the signature to STDOUT and details
12229 about the signature to STDERR. Note that due to
12230 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=
742553">a bug
12231 in the tsget script
</a
>, you might need to modify the included script
12232 and remove the last line. Or just write your own HTTP uploader using
12233 curl. :) Now you too can prove and verify that files have not been
12236 <p
>But the Internet need more public trusted timestamp services.
12237 Perhaps something for
<a href=
"http://www.uninett.no/
">Uninett
</a
> or
12238 my work place the
<a href=
"http://www.uio.no/
">University of Oslo
</a
>
12239 to set up?
</p
>
12244 <title>Video DVD reader library / python-dvdvideo - nice free software
</title>
12245 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Video_DVD_reader_library___python_dvdvideo___nice_free_software.html
</link>
12246 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Video_DVD_reader_library___python_dvdvideo___nice_free_software.html
</guid>
12247 <pubDate>Fri,
21 Mar
2014 15:
25:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
12248 <description><p
>Keeping your DVD collection safe from scratches and curious
12249 children fingers while still having it available when you want to see a
12250 movie is not straight forward. My preferred method at the moment is
12251 to store a full copy of the ISO on a hard drive, and use VLC, Popcorn
12252 Hour or other useful players to view the resulting file. This way the
12253 subtitles and bonus material are still available and using the ISO is
12254 just like inserting the original DVD record in the DVD player.
</p
>
12256 <p
>Earlier I used dd for taking security copies, but it do not handle
12257 DVDs giving read errors (which are quite a few of them). I
've also
12259 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html
">dvdbackup
12260 and genisoimage
</a
>, but these days I use the marvellous python library
12262 <a href=
"http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo
">python-dvdvideo
</a
>
12263 written by Bastian Blank. It is
12264 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/python-dvdvideo.html
">in Debian
12265 already
</a
> and the binary package name is python3-dvdvideo. Instead
12266 of trying to read every block from the DVD, it parses the file
12267 structure and figure out which block on the DVD is actually in used,
12268 and only read those blocks from the DVD. This work surprisingly well,
12269 and I have been able to almost backup my entire DVD collection using
12270 this method.
</p
>
12272 <p
>So far, python-dvdvideo have failed on between
10 and
12273 20 DVDs, which is a small fraction of my collection. The most common
12275 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=
720831">DVDs
12276 using UTF-
16 instead of UTF-
8 characters
</a
>, which according to
12277 Bastian is against the DVD specification (and seem to cause some
12278 players to fail too). A rarer problem is what seem to be inconsistent
12279 DVD structures, as the python library
12280 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=
723079">claim
12281 there is a overlap between objects
</a
>. An equally rare problem claim
12282 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=
741878">some
12283 value is out of range
</a
>. No idea what is going on there. I wish I
12284 knew enough about the DVD format to fix these, to ensure my movie
12285 collection will stay with me in the future.
</p
>
12287 <p
>So, if you need to keep your DVDs safe, back them up using
12288 python-dvdvideo. :)
</p
>
12293 <title>Freedombox on Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and virtual x86 machine
</title>
12294 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Freedombox_on_Dreamplug__Raspberry_Pi_and_virtual_x86_machine.html
</link>
12295 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Freedombox_on_Dreamplug__Raspberry_Pi_and_virtual_x86_machine.html
</guid>
12296 <pubDate>Fri,
14 Mar
2014 11:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
12297 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
">Freedombox
12298 project
</a
> is working on providing the software and hardware for
12299 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
12300 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
12301 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes. It has been
12302 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
12303 release (
0.2).
</p
>
12305 <p
>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
12306 new version will provide
"hard drive
" / SD card / USB stick images for
12307 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
12308 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
12309 file. The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
12310 where most of the needed packages used are already present. Only one,
12311 the freedombox-setup package, is missing. To try to build your own
12312 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
12314 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap
">vmdebootstrap
</a
>
12315 with a user with sudo access to become root:
12318 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
12320 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
12321 mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
12323 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
12326 <p
>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
12327 devices. See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
12328 want all three images, trim the make line. But note that thanks to
<a
12329 href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
741407">a race condition in
12330 vmdebootstrap
</a
>, the build might fail without the patch to the
12331 kpartx call.
</p
>
12333 <p
>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
12334 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
12335 the preseed values:
</p
>
12338 url=
<a href=
"http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat
">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat
</a
>
12341 <p
>But note that due to
<a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
740673">a
12342 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie
</a
>, the installer will
12343 currently hang while setting up APT sources. Killing the
12344 '<tt
>apt-cdrom ident
</tt
>' process when it hang a few times during the
12345 installation will get the installation going. This affect all
12346 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.
</p
>
12348 <p
>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
12349 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
12350 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org:
6667/%
23freedombox
">IRC (#freedombox on
12351 irc.debian.org)
</a
> and
12352 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
">the
12353 mailing list
</a
> if you want to help make this vision come true.
</p
>
12358 <title>How to add extra storage servers in Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</title>
12359 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_add_extra_storage_servers_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html
</link>
12360 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_add_extra_storage_servers_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html
</guid>
12361 <pubDate>Wed,
12 Mar
2014 12:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
12362 <description><p
>On larger sites, it is useful to use a dedicated storage server for
12363 storing user home directories and data. The design for handling this
12364 in
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>, is
12365 to update the automount rules in LDAP and let the automount daemon on
12366 the clients take care of the rest. I was reminded about the need to
12367 document this better when one of the customers of
12368 <a href=
"http://www.slxdrift.no/
">Skolelinux Drift AS
</a
>, where I am
12369 on the board of directors, asked about how to do this. The steps to
12370 get this working are the following:
</p
>
12372 <p
><ol
>
12374 <li
>Add new storage server in DNS. I use nas-server.intern as the
12375 example host here.
</li
>
12377 <li
>Add automoun LDAP information about this server in LDAP, to allow
12378 all clients to automatically mount it on reqeust.
</li
>
12380 <li
>Add the relevant entries in tjener.intern:/etc/fstab, because
12381 tjener.intern do not use automount to avoid mounting loops.
</li
>
12383 </ol
></p
>
12385 <p
>DNS entries are added in GOsa², and not described here. Follow the
12386 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/GettingStarted
">instructions
12387 in the manual
</a
> (Machine Management with GOsa² in section Getting
12388 started).
</p
>
12390 <p
>Ensure that the NFS export points on the server are exported to the
12391 relevant subnets or machines:
</p
>
12393 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
12394 root@tjener:~# showmount -e nas-server
12395 Export list for nas-server:
12396 /storage
10.0.0.0/
8
12398 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
12400 <p
>Here everything on the backbone network is granted access to the
12401 /storage export. With NFSv3 it is slightly better to limit it to
12402 netgroup membership or single IP addresses to have some limits on the
12403 NFS access.
</p
>
12405 <p
>The next step is to update LDAP. This can not be done using GOsa²,
12406 because it lack a module for automount. Instead, use ldapvi and add
12407 the required LDAP objects using an editor.
</p
>
12409 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
12410 ldapvi --ldap-conf -ZD
'(cn=admin)
' -b ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
12411 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
12413 <p
>When the editor show up, add the following LDAP objects at the
12414 bottom of the document. The
"/
&" part in the last LDAP object is a
12415 wild card matching everything the nas-server exports, removing the
12416 need to list individual mount points in LDAP.
</p
>
12418 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
12419 add cn=nas-server,ou=auto.skole,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
12420 objectClass: automount
12422 automountInformation: -fstype=autofs --timeout=
60 ldap:ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
12424 add ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
12426 objectClass: automountMap
12427 ou: auto.nas-server
12429 add cn=/,ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
12430 objectClass: automount
12432 automountInformation: -fstype=nfs,tcp,rsize=
32768,wsize=
32768,rw,intr,hard,nodev,nosuid,noatime nas-server.intern:/
&
12433 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
12435 <p
>The last step to remember is to mount the relevant mount points in
12436 tjener.intern by adding them to /etc/fstab, creating the mount
12437 directories using mkdir and running
"mount -a
" to mount them.
</p
>
12439 <p
>When this is done, your users should be able to access the files on
12440 the storage server directly by just visiting the
12441 /tjener/nas-server/storage/ directory using any application on any
12442 workstation, LTSP client or LTSP server.
</p
>
12447 <title>New home and release
1.0 for netgroup and innetgr (aka ng-utils)
</title>
12448 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_home_and_release_1_0_for_netgroup_and_innetgr__aka_ng_utils_.html
</link>
12449 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_home_and_release_1_0_for_netgroup_and_innetgr__aka_ng_utils_.html
</guid>
12450 <pubDate>Sat,
22 Feb
2014 21:
45:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
12451 <description><p
>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
12452 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
12453 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux
</a
>. I called the project
12454 ng-utils, and it has served me well. I placed the project under the
12455 <a href=
"http://www.hungry.com/
">Hungry Programmer
</a
> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
12456 repository. But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
12457 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
12458 proper home since then.
</p
>
12460 <p
>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
12461 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
12462 a proper source control system. I applied for a project on
12463 <a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/
">Alioth
</a
>, but did not have time
12464 to follow up on it. Until today. :)
</p
>
12466 <p
>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
12467 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
12468 history of the project. I published all release tarballs and imported
12469 them into the git repository. As the project is really stable and not
12470 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
12471 release and call it
1.0. Visit the new project home on
12472 <a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/
">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/
</a
>
12473 if you want to check it out. The new version is also uploaded into
12474 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html
">Debian Unstable
</a
>.
</p
>
12479 <title>Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd
</title>
12480 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html
</link>
12481 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html
</guid>
12482 <pubDate>Mon,
3 Feb
2014 13:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
12483 <description><p
>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
12484 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
12485 boot system instead of their old one. This follow up on the
12486 <a href=
"https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html
">great
12487 Google Summer of Code work
</a
> done last summer by Justus Winter to
12488 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux. To get started,
12489 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
12490 <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
>,
12491 and started it using virt-manager.
</p
>
12493 <p
>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
12494 password) was to get the network operational. I followed
12495 <a href=
"https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install
">the
12496 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page
</a
> and ran these
12497 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
12498 kvm internal DHCP server:
</p
>
12500 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
12501 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
12502 kill $(ps -ef|awk
'/[p]finet/ { print $
2}
')
12503 kill $(ps -ef|awk
'/[d]evnode/ { print $
2}
')
12505 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
12507 <p
>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
12508 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
12509 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.
</p
>
12511 <p
>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
12512 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
12513 set. Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
12514 compression from working. Remember to turn that off on the client
12517 <p
>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
12520 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
12521 cat
> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list
&lt;
&lt;EOF
12522 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
12525 apt-get dist-upgrade
12526 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
12527 sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
12528 update-alternatives --config runsystem
12529 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
12531 <p
>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
12532 <tt
>reboot-hurd
</tt
> instead of just
<tt
>reboot
</tt
>, as there is not
12533 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
12534 'reboot
' command. After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
12535 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
12536 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
12537 start is no longer needed. But for some strange reason, there are no
12538 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
12541 <p
>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
12542 fail some times. No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
12543 figure it out. At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
12544 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem. A way to reduce
12545 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
12546 adding this repository to the machine:
</p
>
12548 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
12549 cat
> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list
&lt;
&lt;EOF
12550 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
12552 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
12554 <p
>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
12555 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
12556 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
12557 BTS. This is the completely list of
"unofficial
" packages installed:
</p
>
12559 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
12560 # aptitude search
'?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))
'
12561 i emacs - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
12562 i gdb - GNU Debugger
12563 i hurd-recommended - Miscellaneous translators
12564 i isc-dhcp-client - ISC DHCP client
12565 i isc-dhcp-common - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
12566 i libc-bin - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
12567 i libc-dev-bin - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
12568 i libc0.3 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
12569 i A libc0.3-dbg - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
12570 i libc0.3-dev - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
12571 i multiarch-support - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
12572 i A x11-common - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
12573 i xorg - X.Org X Window System
12574 i A xserver-xorg - X.Org X server
12575 i A xserver-xorg-input-all - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
12577 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
12579 <p
>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
12580 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
12581 the porters instructions to fix it. This time I was interested in the
12582 command line stuff.
<p
>
12587 <title>A fist full of non-anonymous Bitcoins
</title>
12588 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html
</link>
12589 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html
</guid>
12590 <pubDate>Wed,
29 Jan
2014 14:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
12591 <description><p
>Bitcoin is a incredible use of peer to peer communication and
12592 encryption, allowing direct and immediate money transfer without any
12593 central control. It is sometimes claimed to be ideal for illegal
12594 activity, which I believe is quite a long way from the truth. At least
12595 I would not conduct illegal money transfers using a system where the
12596 details of every transaction are kept forever. This point is
12598 <a href=
"https://www.usenix.org/publications/login
">USENIX ;login:
</a
>
12599 from December
2013, in the article
12600 "<a href=
"https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/
03_meiklejohn-online.pdf
">A
12601 Fistful of Bitcoins - Characterizing Payments Among Men with No
12602 Names
</a
>" by Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole,Grant Jordan, Kirill
12603 Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage. They
12604 analyse the transaction log in the Bitcoin system, using it to find
12605 addresses belong to individuals and organisations and follow the flow
12606 of money from both Bitcoin theft and trades on Silk Road to where the
12607 money end up. This is how they wrap up their article:
</p
>
12609 <p
><blockquote
>
12610 <p
>"To demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analysis, we turned
12611 our attention to criminal activity. In the Bitcoin economy, criminal
12612 activity can appear in a number of forms, such as dealing drugs on
12613 Silk Road or simply stealing someone else’s bitcoins. We followed the
12614 flow of bitcoins out of Silk Road (in particular, from one notorious
12615 address) and from a number of highly publicized thefts to see whether
12616 we could track the bitcoins to known services. Although some of the
12617 thieves attempted to use sophisticated mixing techniques (or possibly
12618 mix services) to obscure the flow of bitcoins, for the most part
12619 tracking the bitcoins was quite straightforward, and we ultimately saw
12620 large quantities of bitcoins flow to a variety of exchanges directly
12621 from the point of theft (or the withdrawal from Silk Road).
</p
>
12623 <p
>As acknowledged above, following stolen bitcoins to the point at
12624 which they are deposited into an exchange does not in itself identify
12625 the thief; however, it does enable further de-anonymization in the
12626 case in which certain agencies can determine (through, for example,
12627 subpoena power) the real-world owner of the account into which the
12628 stolen bitcoins were deposited. Because such exchanges seem to serve
12629 as chokepoints into and out of the Bitcoin economy (i.e., there are
12630 few alternative ways to cash out), we conclude that using Bitcoin for
12631 money laundering or other illicit purposes does not (at least at
12632 present) seem to be particularly attractive.
"</p
>
12633 </blockquote
><p
>
12635 <p
>These researches are not the first to analyse the Bitcoin
12636 transaction log. The
2011 paper
12637 "<a href=
"http://arxiv.org/abs/
1107.4524">An Analysis of Anonymity in
12638 the Bitcoin System
</A
>" by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan is
12639 summarized like this:
</p
>
12641 <p
><blockquote
>
12642 "Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a
12643 complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by
12644 public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will
12645 attempt to construct the one-to-many mapping between users and
12646 public-keys and associate information external to the system with the
12647 users. Bitcoin tries to prevent this attack by storing the mapping of
12648 a user to his or her public-keys on that user
's node only and by
12649 allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In
12650 this chapter we consider the topological structure of two networks
12651 derived from Bitcoin
's public transaction history. We show that the
12652 two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide
12653 complementary views of the Bitcoin system and have implications for
12654 anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and
12655 techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate
12656 an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a
12657 market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars.
"
12658 </blockquote
></p
>
12660 <p
>I hope these references can help kill the urban myth that Bitcoin
12661 is anonymous. It isn
't really a good fit for illegal activites. Use
12662 cash if you need to stay anonymous, at least until regular DNA
12663 sampling of notes and coins become the norm. :)
</p
>
12665 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
12666 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
12667 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
12672 <title>New chrpath release
0.16</title>
12673 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html
</link>
12674 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html
</guid>
12675 <pubDate>Tue,
14 Jan
2014 11:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
12676 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.coverity.com/
">Coverity
</a
> is a nice tool to
12677 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
12678 analysis. It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
12679 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
12680 the source. The company behind it provide
12681 <a href=
"https://scan.coverity.com/
">check of free software projects as
12682 a community service
</a
>, and many hundred free software projects are
12683 already checked. A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
12684 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
12685 <a href=
"http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
">gnash
</a
> and
12686 <a href=
"http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/
">ipmitool
</a
>
12687 projects I am involved with was already registered. But these are
12688 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
12689 check, and decided to
<a href=
"http://scan.coverity.com/projects/
1179">request
12690 checking of the chrpath project
</a
>. It was
12691 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects. Six of
12692 these were real, mostly resource
"leak
" when the program detected an
12693 error. Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
12694 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
12695 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
12696 the future end up in a library. Having fixed all defects and added
12697 <a href=
"https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel
">a
12698 mailing list for the chrpath developers
</a
>, I decided it was time to
12699 publish a new release. These are the release notes:
</p
>
12701 <p
>New in
0.16 released
2014-
01-
14:
</p
>
12705 <li
>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.
</li
>
12706 <li
>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.
</li
>
12707 <li
>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.
</li
>
12712 <a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=
31052">download the
12713 new version
0.16 from alioth
</a
>. Please let us know via the Alioth
12714 project if something is wrong with the new release. The test suite
12715 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
12716 include a test suite check.
</p
>
12721 <title>Debian Edu interview: Dominik George
</title>
12722 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html
</link>
12723 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html
</guid>
12724 <pubDate>Wed,
25 Dec
2013 13:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
12725 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
12726 project
</a
> consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
12727 was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
12728 up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
12729 successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School. Say hello
12730 to
<a href=
"https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Natureshadow
">Dominik
12731 George
</a
>.
</p
>
12733 <!-- http://www.dominik-george.de/images/foto.jpg --
>
12735 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
12737 <p
>I am a
23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
12738 life with open source. In
"real life
", I am, as already mentioned, a
12739 student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
12740 Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
12741 voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
12742 a bit vacant right now however.
</p
>
12744 <p
>I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
12745 (public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
12746 around
2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
12747 it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
12748 network of that school together with a team of very interested and
12749 talented students in the age of
11 to
15 years, who took the chance to
12750 learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
12751 to help building another school
's informational education concept from
12754 <p
>That said, one might see me as a kind of
"glue
" between school kids
12755 and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
12756 ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.
</p
>
12758 <p
>When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
12759 and cycling.
</p
>
12761 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
12762 project?
</strong
></p
>
12764 <p
>I think that happened some time around
2009 when I first attended
12765 <a href=
"http://www.froscon.org
">FrOSCon
</a
> and visited the project
12766 booth. I think I wasn
't too interested back then because I used to
12767 have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
12768 own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
12769 "out-of-the-box
" solution ;).
</p
>
12771 <p
>The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
12772 <a href=
"http://www.openrheinruhr.de
">OpenRheinRuhr
</a
> 2011 when the
12773 BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
12774 really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
12775 ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
12776 a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
12777 guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
12778 small demonstration, but there wasn
't any real feedback and the guys
12779 seemed rather uninterested.
</p
>
12781 <p
>After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
12782 mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
12783 reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
12784 basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!
</p
>
12786 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
12787 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
12789 <p
>The most important advantage seems to be that it
"just
12790 works
". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
12791 in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
12792 without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
12793 from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn
't
12794 have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
12795 and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
12796 server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
12797 notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
12798 and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
12799 it. I could use
8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
12800 tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that
's enough to say
12801 that it rocks!
</p
>
12803 <p
>Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life
's bad, and so no
12804 politician will ever permit a setup described as
"Debian, an universal
12805 operating system, with some really cool educational tools
" while they
12806 will be jsut fine with
"Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
12807 school network
", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
12808 this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
12809 too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).
</p
>
12811 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
12812 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
12814 <p
>I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
12815 answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
12816 other words:
"What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?
" I
12817 can list a few points about that:
</p
>
12821 <li
>always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
12822 <li
>be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
12823 <li
>be helpful at being helpful ;)
12827 <p
>I
'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!
</p
>
12829 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
12831 <p
>First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
12832 all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
12835 <p
>I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
12836 run text tools. I use
12837 <a href=
"https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm
">mksh
</a
> as shell,
12838 <a href=
"https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm
">jupp
</a
> as very advanced
12839 text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
12840 based full-featured student management software with the two),
12841 <a href=
"http://mcabber.com/
">mcabber
</a
> for XMPP and
12842 <a href=
"http://www.irssi.org/
">irssi
</a
> for IRC. For that overly
12843 coloured world called the WWW, I use
12844 <a href=
"https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
">Iceweasel
12845 (Firefox)
</a
>. Oh, and
<a href=
"http://www.mutt.org/
">mutt
</a
> for
12848 <p
>However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
12849 are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
12850 least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
12851 kids. One of these things is
<a href=
"http://jappix.org/
">Jappix
</a
>,
12852 which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
12853 Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
12854 Facebook now ;).
</p
>
12856 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12857 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
12859 <p
>Well, that
's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
12860 side is what I have experienced.
</p
>
12862 <p
>I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
12863 that won
't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
12864 grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
12865 to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
12866 see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
12867 students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
12868 desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
12869 they jsut refused to use it because
"Linux sucks
". It is something
12870 that makes the council of our city spend around
600000 € to buy
12871 software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
12872 networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
12873 not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
12874 already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
12875 if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
12876 that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
12877 plain criminal.
</p
>
12879 <p
>That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
12880 method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
12881 founded an association named
12882 <a href=
"https://www.teckids.org
">Teckids
</a
> here in Germany that does
12883 just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
12884 area of free and open source software, for example the
12885 <a href=
"http://kids.froscon.org
">FrogLabs
</a
>, which share staff with
12886 Teckids and are the youth programme of
12887 <a href=
"http://www.froscon.org
">the Free and Open Source Software
12888 Conference (FrOSCon)
</a
>. We do a lot more than most other conferences
12889 - this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
12890 aged
10 to
16. It was a huge success, with approx.
30 kids taking part
12891 and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
12892 of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.
</p
>
12894 <p
>Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
12895 the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
12896 their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
12897 Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
12898 clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
12899 it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
12900 who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
12901 We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
12902 open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
12903 software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
12904 group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
12905 Skolelinux in the future ;)!
</p
>
12907 <p
>So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren
't for the world
12908 being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
12909 that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
12910 but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.
</p
>
12914 > * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
12916 That
's probably the hardest question of them all, as I do not know the
12917 community. However, I would be willing to do the following:
12919 <li
>Run an interview with a German headteacher who is very open to
12920 free software, and also prefers it, but cannot really use it because
12921 of the decision makers above;
12922 <li
>Run interviews with some kids, both with and without previous
12923 knowledge about free software
12925 If that is wanted, just let me know ;).
12932 <title>Debian Edu interview: Klaus Knopper
</title>
12933 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html
</link>
12934 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html
</guid>
12935 <pubDate>Fri,
6 Dec
2013 09:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
12936 <description><p
>It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
12937 but the
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
12938 Skolelinux
</a
> community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
12939 had a new school administrator show up on
12940 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu
">#debian-edu
</a
> to share
12941 his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school. This
12942 time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
12943 Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
12944 Germany a few years ago.
</p
>
12946 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
12948 <p
>I am Klaus Knopper. I have a master degree in electrical
12949 engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
12950 the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
12951 freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.
</p
>
12953 <p
>All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
12954 from teaching, I
'm also conducting some more or less experimental
12955 projects like the
<a href=
"http://www.knoppix.org
">Knoppix GNU/Linux live
12956 system
</a
> (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
12957 <a href=
"http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html
">ADRIANE
</a
>
12958 (a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
12959 <a href=
"http://www.knopper.net/linbo/index-en.html
">LINBO
</a
>
12960 (Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
12961 system supporting various operating systems).
</p
>
12963 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
12964 project?
</strong
></p
>
12966 <p
>The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
12967 coordinator for Skolelinux. We were looking for an all-in-one open
12968 source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
12969 introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.
</p
>
12971 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
12972 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
12975 <li
>Quick installation,
</li
>
12976 <li
>works (almost) out of the box,
</li
>
12977 <li
>contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,
</li
>
12978 <li
>is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
12979 single company,
</li
>
12980 <li
>has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
12981 experience and problem solutions.
</li
>
12984 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
12985 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
12988 <li
>Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
12989 the next version. Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
12990 a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
12991 working again reliably.
12993 <li
>Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
12994 little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
12995 similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
12998 <li
>Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
12999 configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
13000 not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
13001 configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
13002 and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
13003 network configuration to make it
"Skolelinux-compatible
".
13005 <li
>Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
13006 contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
13007 distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
13008 Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
13009 future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
13010 schemes.
</li
>
13012 <li
>Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
13013 compared to Debian.
</li
>
13017 <p
>For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
13018 rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
13019 Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
13020 upgradeable without reinstallation.
</p
>
13022 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
13024 <p
>GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
13025 programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
13026 occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
13027 programming languages for teaching.
</p
>
13029 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13030 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
13032 <p
>Strong arguments are
</p
>
13036 <li
>Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
13037 teaching and learning.
</li
>
13039 <li
>Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
13040 home, and at their working place without running into license or
13041 conversion problems.
</li
>
13043 <li
>Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
13044 than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
13045 customers to certain products. But teachers need to teach
13046 science, not products.
</li
>
13048 <li
>If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
13049 would you need proprietary software for?
</li
>
13056 <title>Dugnadsnett for alle, a wireless community network in Oslo, take shape
</title>
13057 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnadsnett_for_alle__a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo__take_shape.html
</link>
13058 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnadsnett_for_alle__a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo__take_shape.html
</guid>
13059 <pubDate>Sat,
30 Nov
2013 10:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
13060 <description><p
>If you want the ability to electronically communicate directly with
13061 your neighbors and friends using a network controlled by your peers in
13062 stead of centrally controlled by a few corporations, or would like to
13063 experiment with interesting network technology, the
13064 <a href=
"http://www.dugnadsnett.no/
">Dugnasnett for alle i Oslo
</a
>
13065 might be project for you.
39 mesh nodes are currently being planned,
13066 in the freshly started initiative from NUUG and Hackeriet to create a
13067 wireless community network. The work is inspired by
13068 <a href=
"http://freifunk.net/
">Freifunk
</a
>,
13069 <a href=
"http://www.awmn.net/
">Athens Wireless Metropolitan
13070 Network
</a
>,
<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet
">Roofnet
</a
>
13071 and other successful mesh networks around the globe. Two days ago we
13072 held a workshop to try to get people started on setting up their own
13073 mesh node, and there we decided to create a new mailing list
13074 <a href=
"http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/dugnadsnett
">dugnadsnett
13075 (at) nuug.no
</a
> and IRC channel
13076 <a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/#dugnadsnett.no
">#dugnadsnett.no
</a
> to
13077 coordinate the work. See also the NUUG blog post
13078 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/news/E_postliste_og_IRC_kanal_for_Dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml
">announcing
13079 the mailing list and IRC channel
</a
>.
</p
>
13084 <title>New chrpath release
0.15</title>
13085 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html
</link>
13086 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html
</guid>
13087 <pubDate>Sun,
24 Nov
2013 09:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
13088 <description><p
>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
13089 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
13090 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
13091 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
13092 compiled ELF programs. The update was triggered by the persistence of
13093 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
13094 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc
64-bit Little Endian) he
13095 is working on. I checked the
13096 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath
">Debian
</a
>,
13097 <a href=
"https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath
">Ubuntu
</a
> and
13098 <a href=
"https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath
">Fedora
</a
>
13099 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
13100 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
13101 These are the release notes:
</p
>
13103 <p
>New in
0.15 released
2013-
11-
24:
</p
>
13107 <li
>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
13108 with newer architectures. Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
13111 <li
>Updated README with current URLs.
</li
>
13113 <li
>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
13114 Matthias Klose.
</li
>
13116 <li
>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
13117 Petr Machata found in Fedora.
</li
>
13119 <li
>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
13120 .dynamic is a NULL terminated string. Based on patch found in
13121 Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.
</li
>
13126 <a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=
31052">download the
13127 new version
0.15 from alioth
</a
>. Please let us know via the Alioth
13128 project if something is wrong with the new release. The test suite
13129 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
13130 include a testsuite check.
</p
>
13135 <title>All drones should be radio marked with what they do and who they belong to
</title>
13136 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/All_drones_should_be_radio_marked_with_what_they_do_and_who_they_belong_to.html
</link>
13137 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/All_drones_should_be_radio_marked_with_what_they_do_and_who_they_belong_to.html
</guid>
13138 <pubDate>Thu,
21 Nov
2013 15:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
13139 <description><p
>Drones, flying robots, are getting more and more popular. The most
13140 know ones are the killer drones used by some government to murder
13141 people they do not like without giving them the chance of a fair
13142 trial, but the technology have many good uses too, from mapping and
13143 forest maintenance to photography and search and rescue. I am sure it
13144 is just a question of time before
"bad drones
" are in the hands of
13145 private enterprises and not only state criminals but petty criminals
13146 too. The drone technology is very useful and very dangerous. To have
13147 some control over the use of drones, I agree with Daniel Suarez in his
13149 "<a href=
"https://archive.org/details/DanielSuarez_2013G
">The kill
13150 decision shouldn
't belong to a robot
</a
>", where he suggested this
13151 little gem to keep the good while limiting the bad use of drones:
</p
>
13155 <p
>Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed
13156 I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement
13157 through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on
13158 aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to
13159 download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous
13160 vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and
13161 historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones
13162 to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their
13163 own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their
13164 presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic
13165 drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.
</p
>
13167 <p
>But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It
13168 would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles
13169 and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.
</p
>
13171 </blockquote
>
13173 <p
>The key is that
<em
>every citizen
</em
> should be able to read the
13174 radio beacons sent from the drones in the area, to be able to check
13175 both the government and others use of drones. For such control to be
13176 effective, everyone must be able to do it. What should such beacon
13177 contain? At least formal owner, purpose, contact information and GPS
13178 location. Probably also the origin and target position of the current
13179 flight. And perhaps some registration number to be able to look up
13180 the drone in a central database tracking their movement. Robots
13181 should not have privacy. It is people who need privacy.
</p
>
13186 <title>Lets make a wireless community network in Oslo!
</title>
13187 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo_.html
</link>
13188 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo_.html
</guid>
13189 <pubDate>Wed,
13 Nov
2013 21:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
13190 <description><p
>Today NUUG and Hackeriet announced
13191 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/news/Bli_med___bygge_dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml
">our
13192 plans to join forces and create a wireless community network in
13193 Oslo
</a
>. The workshop to help people get started will take place
13194 Thursday
2013-
11-
28, but we already are collecting the geolocation of
13195 people joining forces to make this happen. We have
13196 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/oslo-nodes.geojson
">9
13197 locations plotted on the map
</a
>, but we will need more before we have
13198 a connected mesh spread across Oslo. If this sound interesting to
13199 you, please join us at the workshop. If you are too impatient to wait
13200 15 days, please join us on the IRC channel
13201 <a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/%
23nuug
">#nuug on irc.freenode.net
</a
>
13202 right away. :)
</p
>
13207 <title>Running TP-Link MR3040 as a batman-adv mesh node using openwrt
</title>
13208 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Running_TP_Link_MR3040_as_a_batman_adv_mesh_node_using_openwrt.html
</link>
13209 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Running_TP_Link_MR3040_as_a_batman_adv_mesh_node_using_openwrt.html
</guid>
13210 <pubDate>Sun,
10 Nov
2013 23:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
13211 <description><p
>Continuing my research into mesh networking, I was recommended to
13212 use TP-Link
3040 and
3600 access points as mesh nodes, and the pair I
13213 bought arrived on Friday. Here are my notes on how to set up the
13214 MR3040 as a mesh node using
13215 <a href=
"http://www.openwrt.org/
">OpenWrt
</a
>.
</p
>
13217 <p
>I started by following the instructions on the OpenWRT wiki for
13218 <a href=
"http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3040
">TL-MR3040
</a
>,
13220 <a href=
"http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin
">the
13221 recommended firmware image
</a
>
13222 (openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin) and
13223 uploaded it into the original web interface. The flashing went fine,
13224 and the machine was available via telnet on the ethernet port. After
13225 logging in and setting the root password, ssh was available and I
13226 could start to set it up as a batman-adv mesh node.
</p
>
13228 <p
>I started off by reading the instructions from
13229 <a href=
"http://wirelessafrica.meraka.org.za/wiki/index.php?title=Antoine
's_Research
">Wireless
13230 Africa
</a
>, which had quite a lot of useful information, but
13231 eventually I followed the recipe from the Open Mesh wiki for
13232 <a href=
"http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Batman-adv-openwrt-config
">using
13233 batman-adv on OpenWrt
</a
>. A small snag was the fact that the
13234 <tt
>opkg install kmod-batman-adv
</tt
> command did not work as it
13235 should. The batman-adv kernel module would fail to load because its
13236 dependency crc16 was not already loaded. I
13237 <a href=
"https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/
14452">reported the bug
</a
> to
13238 the openwrt project and hope it will be fixed soon. But the problem
13239 only seem to affect initial testing of batman-adv, as configuration
13240 seem to work when booting from scratch.
</p
>
13242 <p
>The setup is done using files in /etc/config/. I did not bridge
13243 the Ethernet and mesh interfaces this time, to be able to hook up the
13244 box on my local network and log into it for configuration updates.
13245 The following files were changed and look like this after modifying
13248 <p
><tt
>/etc/config/network
</tt
></p
>
13252 config interface
'loopback
'
13253 option ifname
'lo
'
13254 option proto
'static
'
13255 option ipaddr
'127.0.0.1'
13256 option netmask
'255.0.0.0'
13258 config globals
'globals
'
13259 option ula_prefix
'fdbf:
4c12:
3fed::/
48'
13261 config interface
'lan
'
13262 option ifname
'eth0
'
13263 option type
'bridge
'
13264 option proto
'dhcp
'
13265 option ipaddr
'192.168.1.1'
13266 option netmask
'255.255.255.0'
13267 option hostname
'tl-mr3040
'
13268 option ip6assign
'60'
13270 config interface
'mesh
'
13271 option ifname
'adhoc0
'
13272 option mtu
'1528'
13273 option proto
'batadv
'
13274 option mesh
'bat0
'
13277 <p
><tt
>/etc/config/wireless
</tt
></p
>
13280 config wifi-device
'radio0
'
13281 option type
'mac80211
'
13282 option channel
'11'
13283 option hwmode
'11ng
'
13284 option path
'platform/ar933x_wmac
'
13285 option htmode
'HT20
'
13286 list ht_capab
'SHORT-GI-
20'
13287 list ht_capab
'SHORT-GI-
40'
13288 list ht_capab
'RX-STBC1
'
13289 list ht_capab
'DSSS_CCK-
40'
13290 option disabled
'0'
13292 config wifi-iface
'wmesh
'
13293 option device
'radio0
'
13294 option ifname
'adhoc0
'
13295 option network
'mesh
'
13296 option encryption
'none
'
13297 option mode
'adhoc
'
13298 option bssid
'02:BA:
00:
00:
00:
01'
13299 option ssid
'meshfx@hackeriet
'
13301 <p
><tt
>/etc/config/batman-adv
</tt
></p
>
13304 config
'mesh
' 'bat0
'
13305 option interfaces
'adhoc0
'
13306 option
'aggregated_ogms
'
13307 option
'ap_isolation
'
13308 option
'bonding
'
13309 option
'fragmentation
'
13310 option
'gw_bandwidth
'
13311 option
'gw_mode
'
13312 option
'gw_sel_class
'
13313 option
'log_level
'
13314 option
'orig_interval
'
13315 option
'vis_mode
'
13316 option
'bridge_loop_avoidance
'
13317 option
'distributed_arp_table
'
13318 option
'network_coding
'
13319 option
'hop_penalty
'
13321 # yet another batX instance
13322 # config
'mesh
' 'bat5
'
13323 # option
'interfaces
' 'second_mesh
'
13326 <p
>The mesh node is now operational. I have yet to test its range,
13327 but I hope it is good. I have not yet tested the TP-Link
3600 box
13328 still wrapped up in plastic.
</p
>
13333 <title>Debian init.d boot script example for rsyslog
</title>
13334 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_init_d_boot_script_example_for_rsyslog.html
</link>
13335 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_init_d_boot_script_example_for_rsyslog.html
</guid>
13336 <pubDate>Sat,
2 Nov
2013 22:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
13337 <description><p
>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
13338 <a href=
"http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=
147">to get rid of huge
13339 init.d scripts
</a
>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
13340 init.d scripts at all. Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
13341 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:
</p
>
13343 <p
><pre
>
13344 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
13345 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
13346 # Provides: rsyslog
13347 # Required-Start: $remote_fs $time
13348 # Required-Stop: umountnfs $time
13349 # X-Stop-After: sendsigs
13350 # Default-Start:
2 3 4 5
13351 # Default-Stop:
0 1 6
13352 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
13353 # Description: Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
13354 # It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
13355 # used as a drop-in replacement.
13357 DESC=
"enhanced syslogd
"
13358 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
13359 </pre
></p
>
13361 <p
>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
13362 script was
137 lines, and the above is just
15 lines, most of it meta
13363 info/comments.
</p
>
13365 <p
>How to do this, you ask? Well, one create a new script
13366 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
13368 <p
><pre
>
13371 # Define LSB log_* functions.
13372 # Depend on lsb-base (
>=
3.2-
14) to ensure that this file is present
13373 # and status_of_proc is working.
13374 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
13377 # Function that starts the daemon/service
13383 #
0 if daemon has been started
13384 #
1 if daemon was already running
13385 #
2 if daemon could not be started
13386 start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test
> /dev/null \
13388 start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
13391 # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
13392 # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
13393 # on this one. As a last resort, sleep for some time.
13397 # Function that stops the daemon/service
13402 #
0 if daemon has been stopped
13403 #
1 if daemon was already stopped
13404 #
2 if daemon could not be stopped
13405 # other if a failure occurred
13406 start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/
30/KILL/
5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
13407 RETVAL=
"$?
"
13408 [
"$RETVAL
" =
2 ]
&& return
2
13409 # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
13410 # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
13411 # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
13412 # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
13413 # needed by services started subsequently. A last resort is to
13414 # sleep for some time.
13415 start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=
0/
30/KILL/
5 --exec $DAEMON
13416 [
"$?
" =
2 ]
&& return
2
13417 # Many daemons don
't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
13419 return
"$RETVAL
"
13423 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
13427 # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
13428 # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
13429 # then implement that here.
13431 start-stop-daemon --stop --signal
1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
13436 scriptbasename=
"$(basename $
1)
"
13437 echo
"SN: $scriptbasename
"
13438 if [
"$scriptbasename
" !=
"init-d-library
" ] ; then
13439 script=
"$
1"
13446 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
13447 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
13449 # Exit if the package is not installed
13450 #[ -x
"$DAEMON
" ] || exit
0
13452 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
13453 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ]
&& . /etc/default/$NAME
13455 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
13456 . /lib/init/vars.sh
13458 case
"$
1" in
13460 [
"$VERBOSE
" != no ]
&& log_daemon_msg
"Starting $DESC
" "$NAME
"
13462 case
"$?
" in
13463 0|
1) [
"$VERBOSE
" != no ]
&& log_end_msg
0 ;;
13464 2) [
"$VERBOSE
" != no ]
&& log_end_msg
1 ;;
13468 [
"$VERBOSE
" != no ]
&& log_daemon_msg
"Stopping $DESC
" "$NAME
"
13470 case
"$?
" in
13471 0|
1) [
"$VERBOSE
" != no ]
&& log_end_msg
0 ;;
13472 2) [
"$VERBOSE
" != no ]
&& log_end_msg
1 ;;
13476 status_of_proc
"$DAEMON
" "$NAME
" && exit
0 || exit $?
13478 #reload|force-reload)
13480 # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
13481 # and leave
'force-reload
' as an alias for
'restart
'.
13483 #log_daemon_msg
"Reloading $DESC
" "$NAME
"
13487 restart|force-reload)
13489 # If the
"reload
" option is implemented then remove the
13490 #
'force-reload
' alias
13492 log_daemon_msg
"Restarting $DESC
" "$NAME
"
13494 case
"$?
" in
13497 case
"$?
" in
13498 0) log_end_msg
0 ;;
13499 1) log_end_msg
1 ;; # Old process is still running
13500 *) log_end_msg
1 ;; # Failed to start
13510 echo
"Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}
" >&2
13516 </pre
></p
>
13518 <p
>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
13519 lot. I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
13520 work out of the box, but you get the idea. I did not try very hard to
13521 optimize it nor make it more robust either.
</p
>
13523 <p
>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
13524 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
13525 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
13526 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially. The boot
13527 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.
</p
>
13532 <title>Browser plugin for SPICE (spice-xpi) uploaded to Debian
</title>
13533 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Browser_plugin_for_SPICE__spice_xpi__uploaded_to_Debian.html
</link>
13534 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Browser_plugin_for_SPICE__spice_xpi__uploaded_to_Debian.html
</guid>
13535 <pubDate>Fri,
1 Nov
2013 11:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
13536 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.spice-space.org/
">The SPICE protocol
</a
> for
13537 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
13538 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
13539 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
13540 missing in Debian. The
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
668284">request
13541 for a package
</a
> was from
2012-
04-
10 with no progress since
13542 2013-
04-
01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
13543 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
13544 repository to get a package I could use. I would very much like
13545 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
13546 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
13547 NEW. I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.
</p
>
13549 <p
>The source is now available from
13550 <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
>
13555 <title>Teaching vmdebootstrap to create Raspberry Pi SD card images
</title>
13556 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Teaching_vmdebootstrap_to_create_Raspberry_Pi_SD_card_images.html
</link>
13557 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Teaching_vmdebootstrap_to_create_Raspberry_Pi_SD_card_images.html
</guid>
13558 <pubDate>Sun,
27 Oct
2013 17:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
13559 <description><p
>The
13560 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html
">vmdebootstrap
</a
>
13561 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images. It
13562 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
13563 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
13564 stick. Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
13565 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi
">Raspberry Pi
</a
>, as part
13566 of a plan to simplify the build system for
13567 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
">the FreedomBox
13568 project
</a
>. The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
13569 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
13570 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
13571 Raspberry Pi.
</p
>
13573 <p
>Armed with the knowledge on how to build
"foreign
" (aka non-native
13574 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
13575 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
13576 Debian laptop. I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
13577 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
13578 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html
">Debian
13579 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi
</a
>. First, the
13580 <tt
>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler
</tt
> option tell vmdebootstrap to
13581 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
13582 generated chroot before running the second stage. This allow
13583 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host. Next I added
13584 two new options
<tt
>--bootsize size
</tt
> and
<tt
>--boottype
13585 fstype
</tt
> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
13586 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
13587 partition for the /boot/ stuff. I also added a
<tt
>--variant
13588 variant
</tt
> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
13589 Debian base system packages installed. Finally, I added an option
13590 <tt
>--no-extlinux
</tt
> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
13591 as a boot loader. It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
13592 most other non-x86 architectures. The changes were accepted by the
13593 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
13595 <a href=
"http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/
">the
13596 upstream project page
</a
>.
</p
>
13598 <p
>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
13599 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
13600 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
13603 <p
><pre
>
13605 set -e # Exit on first error
13606 rootdir=
"$
1"
13607 cd
"$rootdir
"
13608 cat
&lt;
&lt;EOF
> etc/apt/sources.list
13609 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
13611 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi. This
13612 # install a kernel somewhere too.
13613 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
13614 -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
13615 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
13616 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
13617 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
13618 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
13619 </pre
></p
>
13621 <p
>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
13622 to build the image:
</p
>
13625 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
13626 --variant minbase \
13628 --distribution jessie \
13629 --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
13634 --log-level debug \
13638 --root-password raspberry \
13639 --hostname raspberrypi \
13640 --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
13641 --customize `pwd`/customize \
13642 --package netbase \
13643 --package git-core \
13644 --package binutils \
13645 --package ca-certificates \
13648 </pre
></p
>
13650 <p
>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
13651 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
13652 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
13653 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant. I really wish there was a way to
13654 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
13655 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
13656 using a non-free binary blob.
</p
>
13658 <p
>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
13659 probably a few others installed. I have not checked the complete
13660 build dependency list.
</p
>
13662 <p
>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
13663 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
13664 optimized for that use. So the images created will be a bit slower
13665 than
<a href=
"http://www.raspbian.org/
">Raspbian
</a
> based images.
</p
>
13670 <title>A Raspberry Pi based batman-adv Mesh network node
</title>
13671 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html
</link>
13672 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html
</guid>
13673 <pubDate>Mon,
21 Oct
2013 11:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
13674 <description><p
>The last few days I have been experimenting with
13675 <a href=
"http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki
">the
13676 batman-adv mesh technology
</a
>. I want to gain some experience to see
13677 if it will fit
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
">the
13678 Freedombox project
</a
>, and together with my neighbors try to build a
13679 mesh network around the park where I live. Batman-adv is a layer
2
13680 mesh system (
"ethernet
" in other words), where the mesh network appear
13681 as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.
</p
>
13683 <p
>My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
13684 around, but I
've been unable to get them working with batman-adv. So
13685 instead, I started playing with a
13686 <a href=
"http://www.raspberrypi.org/
">Raspberry Pi
</a
>, and tried to
13687 get it working as a mesh node. My idea is to use it to create a mesh
13688 node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
13689 the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
13690 network. This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
13691 WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
13692 non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh. This in turn is useful for
13693 Android phones using
<a href=
"http://servalproject.org/
">the Serval
13694 Project
</a
> voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
13695 phone and message each other for free. The reason is that Android
13696 phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
13697 the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted. But if
13698 they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
13699 every client on the local network.
</p
>
13701 <p
>To get this working, I
've created a debian package
13702 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node
">meshfx-node
</a
>
13704 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
">build-rpi-mesh-node
</a
>
13705 to create the Raspberry Pi boot image. I
'm using Debian Jessie (and
13706 not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
13707 Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
13708 image to get it booting, but I
'll ignore that for now. Also, as
13709 Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
13710 Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit. I hope
13711 the routing performance isn
't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
13714 <p
>To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
13715 after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:
</p
>
13717 <p
><pre
>
13718 % wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
13719 https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
13720 % sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node
> build.log
2>&1
13721 % dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=
1M
13723 </pre
></p
>
13725 <p
>Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
13726 wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node. At least it does for
13727 me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
13728 ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
13729 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html
">an
13730 earlier blog post about this mesh testing
</a
>.
</p
>
13732 <p
>The mesh node was not horribly expensive either. I bought
13733 everything over the counter in shops nearby. If I had ordered online
13734 from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:
</p
>
13736 <p
><table
>
13738 <tr
><th
>Supplier
</th
><th
>Model
</th
><th
>NOK
</th
></tr
>
13739 <tr
><td
>Teknikkmagasinet
</td
><td
>Raspberry Pi model B
</td
><td
>349.90</td
></tr
>
13740 <tr
><td
>Teknikkmagasinet
</td
><td
>Raspberry Pi type B case
</td
><td
>99.90</td
></tr
>
13741 <tr
><td
>Lefdal
</td
><td
>Jensen Air:Link
25150</td
><td
>295.-
</td
></tr
>
13742 <tr
><td
>Clas Ohlson
</td
><td
>Kingston
16 GB SD card
</td
><td
>199.-
</td
></tr
>
13743 <tr
><td
>Total cost
</td
><td
></td
><td
>943.80</td
></tr
>
13745 </table
></p
>
13747 <p
>Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
13748 connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the
1th
13749 floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
13750 play-node I use to develop the image building script. And some times
13751 I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it. I look forward
13752 to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
13753 and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)
</p
>
13758 <title>Perl library to control the Spykee robot moved to github
</title>
13759 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot_moved_to_github.html
</link>
13760 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot_moved_to_github.html
</guid>
13761 <pubDate>Sat,
19 Oct
2013 10:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
13762 <description><p
>Back in
2010, I created a Perl library to talk to
13763 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spykee
">the Spykee robot
</a
>
13764 (with two belts, wifi, USB and Linux) and made it available from my
13765 web page. Today I concluded that it should move to a site that is
13766 easier to use to cooperate with others, and moved it to github. If
13767 you got a Spykee robot, you might want to check out
13768 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/libspykee-perl
">the
13769 libspykee-perl github repository
</a
>.
</p
>
13774 <title>Good causes: Debian Outreach Program for Women, EFF documenting the spying and Open access in Norway
</title>
13775 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_causes__Debian_Outreach_Program_for_Women__EFF_documenting_the_spying_and_Open_access_in_Norway.html
</link>
13776 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_causes__Debian_Outreach_Program_for_Women__EFF_documenting_the_spying_and_Open_access_in_Norway.html
</guid>
13777 <pubDate>Tue,
15 Oct
2013 21:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
13778 <description><p
>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
13779 wider attention. I recommend signing and donating to each one of
13780 these. :)
</p
>
13782 <p
>Via
<a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/
2013/
18/
">Debian
13783 Project News for
2013-
10-
14</a
> I came across the Outreach Program for
13784 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
13785 more women involved in free software. One debian sponsor has offered
13786 to match
<a href=
"http://debian.ch/opw2013
">any donation done to Debian
13787 earmarked
</a
> for this initiative. I donated a few minutes ago, and
13788 hope you will to. :)
</p
>
13790 <p
>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
13791 create
<a href=
"https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos
">video
13792 documentaries about the excessive spying
</a
> on every Internet user that
13793 take place these days, and their need to fund the work. I
've already
13794 donated. Are you next?
</p
>
13796 <p
>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
13797 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
13798 statement under the heading
13799 <a href=
"http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/
">Bloggers United for Open
13800 Access
</a
> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
13801 Norwegian government. So far
499 signatures. I hope you will sign it
13807 <title>Oslo community mesh network - with NUUG and Hackeriet at Hausmania
</title>
13808 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html
</link>
13809 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html
</guid>
13810 <pubDate>Fri,
11 Oct
2013 14:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
13811 <description><p
>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
13812 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
13813 areas, depending on the radio technology used. Normal wifi equipment
13814 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
13815 successful examples like
13816 <a href=
"http://www.freifunk.net/
">Freifunk
</a
> and
13817 <a href=
"http://www.awmn.net/
">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network
</a
>
13819 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece
">wikipedia
13820 for a large list
</a
>) around the globe. To give you an idea how it
13821 work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
13822 can be seen from their
13823 <a href=
"http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html
">dynamically
13824 updated node graph and map
</a
>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
13825 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
13826 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
13827 and that is the main topic of this blog post.
</p
>
13829 <p
>I
've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
13830 to do it as part of my involvement with the
<a
13831 href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">NUUG member organisation
</a
> community, and
13832 my recent involvement in
13833 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
">the Freedombox project
</a
>
13834 finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
13835 Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
13836 when possible, given that most communication between people are
13837 between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
13838 communication patterns). It also allow people to communicate without
13839 any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
13840 private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
13841 important over the years.
</p
>
13843 <p
>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
13844 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
13845 <a href=
"http://hackeriet.no/
">Hackeriet
</a
> at Husmania. They seem to
13846 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
13847 <a href=
"http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page
">the Oslo
13848 Freifunk project
</a
>, but that effort is now dead and the people
13849 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
13850 <a href=
"http://meshfx.org/trac
">meshfx
</a
>. Unfortunately the wiki
13851 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
13852 reflect this fact, so the old project page can
't be updated to point to
13853 the new project. A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
13854 from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks. I
13855 came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
13856 speakers about this talk (from
13857 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY
">youtube
</a
>):
</p
>
13859 <p
><iframe width=
"420" height=
"315" src=
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY
" frameborder=
"0" allowfullscreen
></iframe
></p
>
13861 <p
>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
13862 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
13863 figure out which one would be
"best
" for some definitions of best, but
13864 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
13865 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
13866 completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
13867 batman-adv for now. It sure help me to know that the very cool
13868 <a href=
"http://www.servalproject.org/
">Serval project in Australia
</a
>
13869 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
13870 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
13871 less industrialized communities. Check out this cool video presenting
13873 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
30qNfzJCQOA
">youtube
</a
>):
</p
>
13875 <p
><iframe width=
"560" height=
"315" src=
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/
30qNfzJCQOA
" frameborder=
"0" allowfullscreen
></iframe
></p
>
13877 <p
>According to the wikipedia page on
13878 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network
">Wireless
13879 mesh network
</a
> there are around
70 competing schemes for routing
13880 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
13881 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
13882 based community mesh networks.
</p
>
13884 <p
>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer
2
13885 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
13886 network. One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
13887 vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
13888 computer. The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
13889 least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up. A
13890 <a href=
"http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide
">good
13891 introduction
</a
> is available from the Open Mesh project. These are
13892 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:
</p
>
13894 <p
><table
>
13895 <tr
><th
>Setting
</th
><th
>Value
</th
></tr
>
13896 <tr
><td
>Protocol / kernel module
</td
><td
>batman-adv
</td
></tr
>
13897 <tr
><td
>ESSID
</td
><td
>meshfx@hackeriet
</td
></tr
>
13898 <td
>Channel / Frequency
</td
><td
>11 /
2462</td
></tr
>
13899 <td
>Cell ID
</td
><td
>02:BA:
00:
00:
00:
01</td
>
13900 </table
></p
>
13902 <p
>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
13903 in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers. (See a nice post from
13905 "<a href=
"http://tiebing.blogspot.no/
2009/
12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html
">Information
13906 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!
</a
>
13907 for details.) When these settings are activated and you have some
13908 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
13909 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
13910 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)
</p
>
13912 <p
>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
13913 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
13914 firmware supporting batman-adv. If anyone know how to use that old
13915 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.
</p
>
13917 <p
>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
13918 us on IRC, either channel
13919 <a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace
">#oslohackerspace
</a
>
13920 or
<a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug
">#nuug
</a
> on
13921 irc.freenode.net.
</p
>
13923 <p
>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
13924 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
13925 and Innovation called
13926 <a href=
"http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-
2008.pdf
">The
13927 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks
</a
> and elsewhere
13928 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
13929 Grünerløkka in Oslo. So mesh networks are also interesting for
13930 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
13931 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
13932 know have closed down the experiment. Perhaps Telenor or others would
13933 be interested in a cooperation?
</p
>
13935 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
10-
12</strong
>: I was just
13936 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/
2013-October/
005900.html
">told
13937 by the Serval project developers
</a
> that they no longer use
13938 batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
13939 mesh system.
</p
>
13944 <title>Skolelinux / Debian Edu
7.1 install and overview video from Marcelo Salvador
</title>
13945 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_7_1_install_and_overview_video_from_Marcelo_Salvador.html
</link>
13946 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_7_1_install_and_overview_video_from_Marcelo_Salvador.html
</guid>
13947 <pubDate>Tue,
8 Oct
2013 17:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
13948 <description><p
>The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
13949 Salvador had published a
13950 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GgpdqgLFc
">video on
13951 Youtube
</a
> showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
13952 Skolelinux profile. This is the profile intended for use at home or
13953 on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
13954 services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
13955 in other word a single user machine). The result is
11 minutes long,
13956 and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
13957 Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
13958 showing the
<a href=
"http://www.zygotebody.com/
">Zygote Body
3D model
13959 of the human body
</a
>, but I guess he did not know about those or find
13960 other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
13961 advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
13962 Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
13963 computers without hard drives by installing one central
13964 <a href=
"http://www.ltsp.org/
">LTSP server
</a
>.
</p
>
13966 <p
>Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:
</p
>
13968 <iframe width=
"420" height=
"315" src=
"http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-GgpdqgLFc
" frameborder=
"0" allowfullscreen
></iframe
>
13970 <p
>Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux? Please let
13971 me know. :)
</p
>
13976 <title>Finally, Debian Edu Wheezy is released today!
</title>
13977 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html
</link>
13978 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html
</guid>
13979 <pubDate>Sun,
29 Sep
2013 10:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
13980 <description><p
>A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
13981 Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team. The
13982 complete announcement text can be found at
13983 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2013/
20130928">the Debian News
13984 section
</a
>, translated to several languages. Please check it out.
</p
>
13986 <p
>There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon. One
13987 can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
13988 partition is too small. A workaround is to extend the partition (use
13989 lvresize + resize2fs in tty
2 while installing).
</p
>
13994 <title>Videos about the Freedombox project - for inspiration and learning
</title>
13995 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Videos_about_the_Freedombox_project___for_inspiration_and_learning.html
</link>
13996 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Videos_about_the_Freedombox_project___for_inspiration_and_learning.html
</guid>
13997 <pubDate>Fri,
27 Sep
2013 14:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
13998 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/
">Freedombox
13999 project
</a
> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
14000 vision, ideas and solution several places. Here is a little
14001 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.
</p
>
14005 <li
><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA
">FreedomBox -
14006 2,
5 minute marketing film
</a
> (Youtube)
</li
>
14008 <li
><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE
">Eben Moglen
14009 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news
2011</a
> (Youtube)
</li
>
14011 <li
><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g
">Eben Moglen -
14012 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
14013 Web
2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting
2010</a
>
14014 (Youtube)
</li
>
14016 <li
><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE
">Fosdem
2011
14017 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox
</a
> (Youtube)
</li
>
14019 <li
><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
9bDDUyJSQ9s
">Presentation of
14020 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz
2011</a
> (Youtube)
</li
>
14022 <li
><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s
"> Freedombox -
14023 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
14024 York City in
2012</a
> (Youtube)
</li
>
14026 <li
><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck
">Introduction
14027 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in
2012</a
>
14028 (Youtube)
</li
>
14030 <li
><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ
">Freedom, Out
14031 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat,
2012</a
> (Youtube)
</li
>
14033 <li
><a href=
"https://archive.fosdem.org/
2013/schedule/event/freedombox/
">Freedombox
14034 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem
2013</a
> (FOSDEM)
</li
>
14036 <li
><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg
">What is the
14037 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
14038 2013</a
> (Youtube)
</li
>
14042 <p
>A larger list is available from
14043 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations
">the
14044 Freedombox Wiki
</a
>.
</p
>
14046 <p
>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
14047 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
14048 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
14049 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
14050 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
14051 pending in NEW. The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
14052 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload. Join
14053 us on
<a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org:
6667/%
23freedombox
">IRC
14054 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)
</a
> and
14055 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
">the
14056 mailing list
</a
> if you want to help make this vision come true.
</p
>
14061 <title>Third and probably last beta release of Debian Edu Wheezy
</title>
14062 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_and_probably_last_beta_release_of_Debian_Edu_Wheezy.html
</link>
14063 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_and_probably_last_beta_release_of_Debian_Edu_Wheezy.html
</guid>
14064 <pubDate>Mon,
16 Sep
2013 21:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
14065 <description><p
>The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
14066 today. This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:
</p
>
14069 <p
>Hi,
</p
>
14071 <p
>it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta
2 for
14072 short) of
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
14073 Skolelinux
</a
> based on Debian Wheezy!
</p
>
14075 <p
>Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
14076 we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
14077 weekend. We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
14078 if you find something, please notify us immediately!
</p
>
14080 <p
>(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
14081 another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)
</p
>
14083 <p
>Noteworthy changes and software updates for Debian Edu
7.1+edu0~b2
14084 compared to beta1:
</p
>
14088 <li
>The KDE proxy setup has been adjusted to use the provided wpad.dat. This
14089 also gets Chromium to use this proxy.
</li
>
14090 <li
>Install kdepim-groupware with KDE desktops to make sure korganizer
14091 understand ical/dav sources.
</li
>
14092 <li
>Increased default maximum size of /var/spool/squid and /skole/backup on the
14093 main server.
</li
>
14094 <li
>A source DVD image containing all source packages is now available as well.
</li
>
14095 <li
>Updates for chromium (
29.0.1547.57-
1~deb7u1), imagemagick
14096 (
6.7.7.10-
5+deb7u2), php5 (
5.4.4-
14+deb7u4), libmodplug
14097 (
0.8.8.4-
3+deb7u1+git20130828), tiff (
4.0.2-
6+deb7u2), linux-image
14098 (
3.2.0-
4-
486_3.2
.46-
1+deb7u1).
</li
>
14102 <p
>Where to get it:
</p
>
14104 <p
>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
</p
>
14107 <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
>
14108 <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
>
14109 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso .
</li
>
14112 <p
>The SHA1SUM of this image is:
3a1c89f4666df80eebcd46c5bf5fedb866f9472f
</p
>
14114 <p
>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
14116 <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
>
14117 <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
>
14118 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso .
</li
>
14121 <p
>The SHA1SUM of this image is:
702d1718548f401c74bfa6df9f032cc3ee16597e
</p
>
14123 <p
>The Source DVD image has the filename
14124 debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b2-source-DVD.iso and the SHA1SUM
14125 089eed8b3f962db47aae1f6a9685e9bb2fa30ca5 and is available the same way
14126 as the other isos.
</p
>
14128 <p
>How to report bugs
</p
>
14130 <p
>For information how to report bugs please see
14131 <br
><a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
</a
></p
>
14134 <p
>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</p
>
14136 <p
>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
14137 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
14138 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
14139 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
14140 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
14141 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
14142 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
14143 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
14144 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
14145 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
14146 services. The desktop contains more than
60 educational software
14147 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
14148 can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.
</p
>
14150 <p
>This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
14151 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
14152 Squeeze release.
</p
>
14154 <p
>Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases
</p
>
14156 <p
>Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
14157 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
14158 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
14159 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (
1) Keep
14160 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (
2)
14161 Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
14162 password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
14163 (backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
14164 to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
14165 directory.
</p
>
14169 <br
> Holger
</p
>
14170 </blockquote
>
14175 <title>Recipe to test the Freedombox project on amd64 or Raspberry Pi
</title>
14176 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recipe_to_test_the_Freedombox_project_on_amd64_or_Raspberry_Pi.html
</link>
14177 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recipe_to_test_the_Freedombox_project_on_amd64_or_Raspberry_Pi.html
</guid>
14178 <pubDate>Tue,
10 Sep
2013 14:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
14179 <description><p
>I was introduced to the
14180 <a href=
"http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/
">Freedombox project
</a
>
14181 in
2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
14182 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
14183 within the legal protection of their own homes. The idea is to give
14184 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
14185 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture. Instead of
14186 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
14187 control over their own basic infrastructure.
</p
>
14189 <p
>I
've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
14190 taken priority. But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
14191 and privilege exercised by the
"western
" intelligence gathering
14192 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
14193 actually started working on the project a while back.
</p
>
14195 <p
>The
<a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/
">initial
14196 Debian initiative
</a
> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
14197 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
14198 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
14199 communication. The initial deployment platform have been the
14200 <a href=
"http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx
">Dreamplug
</a
>,
14201 which is a piece of hardware I do not own. So to be able to test what
14202 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
14203 it on some hardware I do have access to. I have rewritten the
14204 <a href=
"https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker
">freedom-maker
</a
>
14205 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
14206 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
14207 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
14208 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
14209 missing in Debian).
</p
>
14211 <p
>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
14213 (
<a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup
">freedombox-setup
</a
>),
14214 and a administrative web interface
14215 (
<a href=
"https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth
">plinth
</a
> + exmachina +
14216 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
14217 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy
">privoxy
</a
>
14218 (freedombox-privoxy). There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
14219 client (
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat
">jwchat
</a
>)
14220 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
14221 (
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd
">ejabberd
</a
>). The
14222 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
14223 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc. Not much of
14224 this is really working yet, see
14225 <a href=
"https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO
">the
14226 project TODO
</a
> for links to GIT repositories. Most of the code is
14227 on github at the moment. The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
14228 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
14229 users. I
've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
14230 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
14231 with lots of half baked features.
</p
>
14233 <p
>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
14234 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
14237 <p
><strong
>Debian Wheezy amd64
</strong
></p
>
14241 <li
>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.
</li
>
14242 <li
>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.
</li
>
14243 <li
><p
>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
14244 to the Debian installer:
<p
>
14245 <pre
>url=
<a href=
"http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat
">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat
</a
></pre
></li
>
14247 <li
>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
14248 install on.
</li
>
14250 <li
>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
14251 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.
</li
>
14255 <p
><strong
>Raspberry Pi Raspbian
</strong
></p
>
14259 <li
>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.
</li
>
14260 <li
>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.
</li
>
14261 <li
><p
>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:
</p
>
14263 deb
<a href=
"http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/
">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox
</a
> wheezy main
14264 </pre
></li
>
14265 <li
><p
>Run this as root:
</p
>
14267 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
14270 apt-get install freedombox-setup
14271 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
14272 </pre
></li
>
14273 <li
>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.
</li
>
14277 <p
>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
14278 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
14279 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
14280 in my APT repository. But do not let this stop you. It is only a
14281 short
"<tt
>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy
</tt
>" away. :)
</p
>
14283 <p
>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
14284 192.168.1.0/
24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
14285 off the DHCP server by running
"<tt
>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
14286 disable
</tt
>" as root.
</p
>
14288 <p
>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
14289 problems. We gather on the IRC channel
14290 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org:
6667/%
23freedombox
">#freedombox
</a
> on
14291 irc.debian.org and the
14292 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
">project
14293 mailing list
</a
>.
</p
>
14295 <p
>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
14296 <tt
>http://your-host-name:
8001/
</tt
> to see the state of the plint
14297 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
14298 get past it), and next visit
<tt
>http://your-host-name:
8001/help/
</tt
>
14299 to look at the rest of plinth. The default user is
'admin
' and the
14300 default password is
'secret
'.
</p
>
14305 <title>Second beta release (beta
1) of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy
</title>
14306 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_beta_release__beta_1__of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</link>
14307 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_beta_release__beta_1__of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</guid>
14308 <pubDate>Thu,
22 Aug
2013 09:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
14309 <description><p
>The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
14310 today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows
14311 integration fixes . This is the release announcement:
</p
>
14313 <p
><strong
>New features for Debian Edu
7.1+edu0~b1 released
2013-
08-
22</strong
></p
>
14315 <p
>These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
14316 7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename
"Wheezy
".
</p
>
14318 <p
><strong
>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</strong
></p
>
14320 <p
><a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu, also known as
14321 Skolelinux
</a
>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
14322 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
14323 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
14324 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
14325 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
14326 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
14327 the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be
14328 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
14329 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
14330 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
14332 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html
">more
14333 than
60 educational software packages
</a
> and more are available from
14334 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
14335 and Xfce desktop environment.
</p
>
14337 <p
>This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this
14338 is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze
14341 <p
>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
14342 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
14343 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
14344 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (
1) Keep
14345 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined
14346 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/
2013/
08/msg00127.html
">on
14347 the mailing list
</a
>. (
2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and
14348 replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password
14349 hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user
14350 need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for
14351 CIFS access to their home directory.
</p
>
14353 <p
><strong
>Software updates
</strong
></p
>
14357 <li
>Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh
14358 work also without a attached tty.
</li
>
14359 <li
>Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to
14360 make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line
14361 tools. Please note, that the command
'update-command-not-found
'
14362 has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access
14363 required).
</li
>
14367 <p
><strong
>Other changes
</strong
></p
>
14371 <li
>Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool
14372 needed for desktop=xfce installations.
</li
>
14373 <li
>Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB
14374 stick ISO image.
</li
>
14375 <li
>Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).
</li
>
14376 <li
>Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.
</li
>
14377 <li
>Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens
14378 during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to
14379 cope with this.
</li
>
14380 <li
>Make Samba passwords changeable (again) via GOsa².
</li
>
14381 <li
>Fix generation of LM and NT password hashes via GOsa² to avoid
14382 empty password hashes.
</li
>
14383 <li
>Adapted Samba machine domain joining to latest change in the
14384 smbldap-tools Perl package, fixing bugs blocking Windows machines
14385 from joining the Samba domain.
</li
>
14389 <p
><strong
>Known issues
</strong
></p
>
14393 <li
>KDE fails to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
14394 not use the http proxy as it should.
</li
>
14395 <li
>Chromium also fails to use the proxy when using the KDE desktop
14396 (using the KDE configuration).
</li
>
14400 <p
><strong
>Where to get it
</strong
></p
>
14402 <p
>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
</p
>
14406 <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
>
14408 <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
>
14410 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso .
</li
>
14414 <p
>The MD5SUM of this image is:
1e357f80b55e703523f2254adde6d78b
14415 <br
>The SHA1SUM of this image is:
7157f9be5fd27c7694d713c6ecfed61c3edda3b2
</p
>
14417 <p
>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
</p
>
14421 <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
>
14422 <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
>
14423 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso .
</li
>
14427 <p
>The MD5SUM of this image is:
7a8408ead59cf7e3cef25afb6e91590b
14428 <br
>The SHA1SUM of this image is: f1817c031f02790d5edb3bfa0dcf8451088ad119
</p
>
14431 <p
><strong
>How to report bugs
</strong
></p
>
14433 <p
><a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
</a
>
14438 <title>Intel
180 SSD disk with Lenovo firmware can not use Intel firmware
</title>
14439 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_180_SSD_disk_with_Lenovo_firmware_can_not_use_Intel_firmware.html
</link>
14440 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_180_SSD_disk_with_Lenovo_firmware_can_not_use_Intel_firmware.html
</guid>
14441 <pubDate>Sun,
18 Aug
2013 14:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
14442 <description><p
>Earlier, I reported about
14443 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html
">my
14444 problems using an Intel SSD
520 Series
180 GB disk
</a
>. Friday I was
14445 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away. And as
14446 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
14447 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
14448 currently on the disk.
</p
>
14450 <p
>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
14451 <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
>
14452 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
14453 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
14454 disks. I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
14455 booted the ISO from a USB stick. The disk was recognized, but the
14456 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
14457 to insert any Intel firmware. So no change, and the disk is still
14458 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
14459 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware. No idea how likely
14460 that is. Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness. I
14461 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
14462 the broken disks.
</p
>
14467 <title>90 percent done with the Norwegian draft translation of Free Culture
</title>
14468 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/
90_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html
</link>
14469 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/
90_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html
</guid>
14470 <pubDate>Fri,
2 Aug
2013 10:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
14471 <description><p
>It has been a while since my last update. Since last summer, I
14472 have worked on a Norwegian
14473 <a href=
"http://www.docbook.org/
">docbook
</a
> version of the
2004 book
14474 <a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
> by Lawrence Lessig,
14475 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright
14476 law. Yesterday, I finally broken the
90% mark, when counting the
14477 number of strings to translate. Due to real life constraints, I have
14478 not had time to work on it since March, but when the summer broke out,
14479 I found time to work on it again. Still lots of work left, but the
14480 first draft is nearing completion. I created a graph to show the
14481 progress of the translation:
</p
>
14483 <p
><img width=
"80%
" align=
"center
" src=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png
"></p
>
14485 <p
>When the first draft is done, the translated text need to be
14486 proof read, and the remaining formatting problems with images and SVG
14487 drawings need to be fixed. There are probably also some index entries
14488 missing that need to be added. This can be done by comparing the
14489 index entries listed in the SiSU version of the book, or comparing the
14490 English docbook version with the paper version. Last, the colophon
14491 page with ISBN numbers etc need to be wrapped up before the release is
14492 done. I should also figure out how to get correct Norwegian sorting
14493 of the index pages. All docbook tools I have tried so far (xmlto,
14494 docbook-xsl, dblatex) get the order of symbols and the special
14495 Norwegian letters ÆØÅ wrong.
</p
>
14497 <p
>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
14498 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
14499 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
14500 translation and proof reading. And I would like the figures to be
14501 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them. Any SVG master
14502 around? There are also some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me.
14503 If you want to help, please get in touch with me, and check out the
14504 project files currently available from
14505 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>.
</p
>
14507 <p
>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
14509 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true
">PDF
</a
>
14511 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true
">EPUB
</a
>
14512 are published on github. The HTML version is published as well, but
14513 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
14514 saw no point in linking to that version.
</p
>
14519 <title>First beta release of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy
</title>
14520 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_beta_release_of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</link>
14521 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_beta_release_of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</guid>
14522 <pubDate>Sat,
27 Jul
2013 20:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
14523 <description><p
>The first wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
14524 today. This is the release announcement:
</p
>
14526 <p
><strong
>New features for Debian Edu
7.1+edu0~b0 released
14527 2013-
07-
27</strong
></p
>
14529 <p
>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
14530 7.1+edu0~b0, based on Debian with codename
"Wheezy
".
</p
>
14532 <p
><strong
>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</strong
></p
>
14534 <p
><a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu, also known as
14535 Skolelinux
</a
>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
14536 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
14537 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
14538 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
14539 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
14540 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
14541 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
14542 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
14543 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
14544 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
14546 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html
">more
14547 than
60 educational software packages
</a
> and more are available from
14548 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
14549 and Xfce desktop environment.
</p
>
14551 <p
>This is the fifth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
14552 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
14553 Squeeze release.
</p
>
14555 <p
>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
14556 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
14559 <p
><strong
>Software updates
</strong
></p
>
14563 <li
>Switched roaming workstation profiles from wicd to network-manager
14564 for network configuration, as wicd didn
't work any more.
</li
>
14565 <li
>Changed version numbers of patched gosa and libpam-mklocaluser
14566 packages to make sure our locally patched versions will be replaced
14567 by the official packages when they are released from Debian. Those
14568 installing alpha version need to reinstall or manually downgrade gosa
14569 and libpam-mklocaluser.
</li
>
14570 <li
>Added bluetooth tools to the default desktop (bluedevil, blueman).
</li
>
14571 <li
>Added tools for sharing the desktop on KDE (krdc, krfb).
</li
>
14572 <li
>Added valgrind to the default installation for easier debugging of
14573 crash bugs.
</li
>
14577 <p
><strong
>Other changes
</strong
></p
>
14581 <li
>Fixed artwork package to work with gnome, no longer break
14582 desktop=gnome installations.
</li
>
14583 <li
>Adjusted installer to now work when forced to use a proxy with the
14584 netinst CD.
</li
>
14585 <li
>Fixed code detecting and setting/loading hardware specific
14586 setup/firmware to work more robust out of the box.
</li
>
14587 <li
>Adjusted Kerberos setup to detect realm and server settings at
14588 install time instead of dynamically at run time. This avoid a crash
14589 with krb5-auth-dialog on diskless workstations without a DNS name.
</li
>
14590 <li
>Worked around misfeature in network-manager not calling the dhclient
14591 exit hooks, causing automatic proxy configuration and automatic host
14592 name setting at run time to work again.
</li
>
14593 <li
>Fixed feature setting the default Iceweasel start page from URL
14594 fetched from LDAP, to allow schools to set the global default by
14595 updating the dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no LDAP object.
</li
>
14596 <li
>Changed default host name on all networked machines to be unique
14597 (generated from MAC or reverse DNS) after boot.
</li
>
14598 <li
>Adjusted partition sizes to make sure they are big enough.
</li
>
14602 <p
><strong
>Known issues
</strong
></p
>
14606 <li
>Grub is missing the new artwork.
</li
>
14607 <li
>KDE fail to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
14608 not use the http proxy as it should.
</li
>
14609 <li
>Chromium also fail to use the proxy.
</li
>
14613 <p
><strong
>Where to get it
</strong
></p
>
14615 <p
>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
</p
>
14619 <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
>
14621 <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
>
14623 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso .
</li
>
14627 <p
>The MD5SUM of this image is:
55d5de9765b6dccd5d9ec33cf1a07109
14628 <br
>The SHA1SUM of this image is:
996a1d9517740e4d627d100de2d12b23dd545a3f
</p
>
14630 <p
>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
</p
>
14634 <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
>
14635 <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
>
14636 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso .
</li
>
14640 <p
>The MD5SUM of this image is: d8f0818c51a78d357de794066f289f69
14641 <br
>The SHA1SUM of this image is:
49185ca354e8d0543240423746924f76a6cee733
</p
>
14644 <p
><strong
>How to report bugs
</strong
></p
>
14646 <p
><a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
</a
>
14651 <title>How to fix a Thinkpad X230 with a broken
180 GB SSD disk
</title>
14652 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html
</link>
14653 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html
</guid>
14654 <pubDate>Wed,
17 Jul
2013 23:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
14655 <description><p
>Today I switched to
14656 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html
">my
14657 new laptop
</a
>. I
've previously written about the problems I had with
14658 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
14659 <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
14660 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware
</a
> that did not handle
14661 sustained writes. My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
14662 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
14663 identical
180 GB disks they decided to send me a
256 GB Samsung SSD
14664 disk instead to fix it once and for all. The Samsung disk survived
14665 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
14666 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
14667 decided to trust it with my data. I have installed it as a Debian Edu
14668 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
14669 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
14670 station from now on.
</p
>
14672 <p
>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
14673 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
14674 performance and increase life time of the disk. The Linux kernel and
14675 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
14676 environment. To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
14677 package
<tt
>ssd-setup
</tt
> to handle this tuning. The
14678 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git
">source
14679 for the ssd-setup package
</a
> is available from collab-maint, and it
14680 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
14681 package. If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
14682 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
14683 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.
</p
>
14685 <p
>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
14686 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD. It is adjusted to my use case,
14687 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
14688 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
14689 top of this again. See the README file in the package source for the
14690 references I used to pick the settings. At the moment these
14691 parameters are tuned:
</p
>
14695 <li
>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
14696 (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)
</li
>
14698 <li
>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
14699 this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
14700 0 to
1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.
</li
>
14702 <li
>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
14703 systems.
</li
>
14705 <li
>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding
'discard
' to
14706 /etc/fstab.
</li
>
14708 <li
>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.
</li
>
14710 <li
>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
14711 cron.daily).
</li
>
14713 <li
>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to
1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
14714 to
50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.
</li
>
14718 <p
>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
14719 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
14720 little gain. My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
14721 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
14722 computer. I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
14723 from getting the data on the disk (see
14724 <a href=
"http://xkcd.com/
538/
">XKCD #
538</a
> for an explanation why).
14725 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
14726 right thing to do.
</p
>
14728 <p
>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
14729 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
14730 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.
</p
>
14732 <p
>I also considered using the
'discard
' file system option for ext3
14733 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
14734 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
14735 instead of during my work.
</p
>
14737 <p
>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
14738 this is already done by Debian Edu.
</p
>
14740 <p
>I have not yet started on the user space tuning. I expect
14741 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
14742 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.
</p
>
14744 <p
>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
14747 <p
>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
14748 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
14749 disk. It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
14750 the Lenovo firmware. But I have not tried and did not want to do so
14751 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
14752 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
14758 <title>Intel SSD
520 Series
180 GB with Lenovo firmware still lock up from sustained writes
</title>
14759 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html
</link>
14760 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html
</guid>
14761 <pubDate>Wed,
10 Jul
2013 13:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
14762 <description><p
>A few days ago, I wrote about
14763 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html
">the
14764 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk
</a
>, which
14765 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
14766 sustained write. My supplier is in contact with
14767 <a href=
"http://www.lenovo.com/
">Lenovo
</a
>, and they wanted to send a
14768 replacement disk to try to fix the problem. They decided to send an
14769 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.
</p
>
14771 <p
>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
14772 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it. The new disk have the
14773 same firmware version as the original. This time my hope raised
14774 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
14775 die after
4-
7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
14776 going past
10%,
20%,
40% and even past
50%. But around
60%, the disk
14777 died again and I was back on square one. I still do not have a new
14778 laptop with a disk I can trust. I can not live with a disk that might
14779 lock up when I download a new
14780 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> ISO or
14781 other large files. I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
14782 the next proposal from Lenovo.
</p
>
14784 <p
>The original disk is marked Intel SSD
520 Series
180 GB,
14785 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
14786 LF1i,
29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-
300, LBA
351,
651,
888, LI P/N:
0C38722,
14787 Pb-free
2LI, LC P/N:
16-
200366, WWN:
55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
14788 SSDSC2BW180A3L
2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD
180G
5V
1A, ASM P/N
0C38732, FRU
14789 P/N
45N8295, P0C38732.
</p
>
14791 <p
>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD
520 Series
180 GB,
14792 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-
302, FW:
14793 LF1i,
22APR2013, PBA: G39779-
300, LBA
351,
651,
888, LI P/N:
0C38722,
14794 Pb-free
2LI, LC P/N:
16-
200366, WWN:
55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
14795 SSDSC2BW180A3L
2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD
180G
5V
1A, ASM P/N
0C38732, FRU
14796 P/N
45N8295, P0C38732.
</p
>
14798 <p
>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
14799 SA, date and WNPP values. Mentioning all the details here in case
14800 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
14801 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
14807 <title>July
13th: Debian/Ubuntu BSP and Skolelinux/Debian Edu developer gathering in Oslo
</title>
14808 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/July_13th__Debian_Ubuntu_BSP_and_Skolelinux_Debian_Edu_developer_gathering_in_Oslo.html
</link>
14809 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/July_13th__Debian_Ubuntu_BSP_and_Skolelinux_Debian_Edu_developer_gathering_in_Oslo.html
</guid>
14810 <pubDate>Tue,
9 Jul
2013 10:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
14811 <description><p
>The upcoming Saturday,
2013-
07-
13, we are organising a combined
14812 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
14813 party in Oslo. It is organised by
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">the
14814 member assosiation NUUG
</a
> and
14815 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
14816 project
</a
> together with
<a href=
"http://bitraf.no/
">the hack space
14817 Bitraf
</a
>.
</p
>
14819 <p
>It starts
10:
00 and continue until late evening. Everyone is
14820 welcome, and there is no fee to participate. There is on the other
14821 hand limited space, and only room for
30 people. Please put your name
14822 on
<a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/
2013/
07/
13/no/Oslo
">the event
14823 wiki page
</a
> if you plan to join us.
</p
>
14828 <title>The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230?
</title>
14829 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html
</link>
14830 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html
</guid>
14831 <pubDate>Fri,
5 Jul
2013 08:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
14832 <description><p
>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
14833 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html
">replacement
14834 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41
</a
>. Unfortunately I did not have much
14835 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
14836 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived. I
14838 <a href=
"http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230
">Thinkpad X230
</a
>
14839 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN). I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
14840 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly. But my
14841 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful. More
14842 on that below.
</p
>
14844 <p
>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
14845 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
14846 listed in the feature list. But I did get good help from the search
14847 feature at
<a href=
"http://www.prisjakt.no/
">Prisjakt
</a
>, which
14848 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
14849 requirements. A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
14850 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
14851 disks from my search parameters. I also asked around among friends to
14852 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.
</p
>
14854 <p
>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
14855 X41. I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
14856 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
14857 hand a lot more to reach the edges. But the key response is fairly
14858 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
14859 I will get used to it. My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
14860 needed a new laptop now. :)
</p
>
14862 <p
>Turning off the touch pad was simple. All it took was a quick
14863 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.
</p
>
14865 <p
>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop. The
180 GB SSD disk
14866 lock up during load. And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
14867 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
14868 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
14869 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
14870 default in Ubuntu). And the bug with is already known. It was
14871 reported to Debian as
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
691427">BTS
14872 report #
691427 2012-
10-
25</a
> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
14873 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD). It is also reported to the Linux
14874 kernel developers as
14875 <a href=
"https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=
51861">Kernel bugzilla
14876 report #
51861 2012-
12-
20</a
> (Intel SSD
520 stops working under load
14877 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
14878 Lenovo forums, both for
14879 <a href=
"http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-
520-
180GB-issue/m-p/
1070549">T430
14880 2012-
11-
10</a
> and for
14881 <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
14882 03-
20-
2013</a
>. The problem do not only affect installation. The
14883 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
14884 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
14885 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
14887 <a href=
"https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git
">small C program
14888 available
</a
> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
14889 minutes by writing to a file.
</p
>
14891 <p
>I
've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
14892 contacting PCHELP Norway (request
01D1FDP) which handle support
14893 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
14894 firmware. Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
14895 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i). I
14896 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
14897 fixed. :)
</p
>
14902 <title>The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230
</title>
14903 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230.html
</link>
14904 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230.html
</guid>
14905 <pubDate>Thu,
4 Jul
2013 09:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
14906 <description><p
>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
14907 trusty old Thinkpad X41. Unfortunately I did not have much time to
14908 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived. I ended up
14909 picking a
<a href=
"http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230
">Thinkpad
14910 X230
</a
> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN). I first test installed Debian Edu
14911 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly. As I write
14912 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
14913 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
14914 with an expencive door stop.
</p
>
14916 <p
>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
14917 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
14918 listed in the feature list. But I did get good help from the search
14919 feature at
<ahref=
"http://www.prisjakt.no/
">Prisjakt
</a
>, which
14920 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
14921 requirements. A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
14922 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.
</p
>
14924 <p
>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
14925 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
14926 to reach the edges. But the key response is fairly good and the
14927 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
14928 used to it. My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
14929 new laptop now. :)
</p
>
14931 <p
>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.
</p
>
14936 <title>Fourth alpha release of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy
</title>
14937 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fourth_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</link>
14938 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fourth_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</guid>
14939 <pubDate>Wed,
3 Jul
2013 14:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
14940 <description><p
>The fourth wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
14941 today. This is the release announcement:
</p
>
14943 <p
><strong
>New features for Debian Edu
7.1+edu0~alpha3 released
14944 2013-
07-
03</strong
></p
>
14946 <p
>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
14947 7.1+edu0~alpha3, based on Debian with codename
"Wheezy
".
</p
>
14949 <p
><strong
>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</strong
></p
>
14951 <p
><a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu, also known as
14952 Skolelinux
</a
>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
14953 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
14954 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
14955 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
14956 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
14957 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
14958 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
14959 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
14960 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
14961 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
14963 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html
">more
14964 than
60 educational software packages
</a
> and more are available from
14965 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
14966 and Xfce desktop environment.
</p
>
14968 <p
>This is the fourth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
14969 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
14970 Squeeze release.
</p
>
14972 <p
><strong
>Software updates
</strong
></p
>
14974 <li
>Dropped ispell dictionaries from our default installation.
</li
>
14975 <li
>Dropped menu-xdg from the KDE desktop option, to drop the Debian
14976 submenu. It was not included with Gnome, LXDE or Xfce, so this
14977 brings KDE in line with the others.
</li
>
14978 <li
>Dropped xdrawchem, xjig and xsok from our default installation as
14979 they don
't have a desktop menu entry and thus won
't show up in the
14980 menu now that menu-xdg was removed.
</li
>
14981 <li
>Removed the killer system to kill left behind processes on
14982 multi-user machines, as it was no longer able to understand when a
14983 X display was in use and killed the processes of the active users
14985 <li
>Dropped the golearn (from goplay) package as the debtags in wheezy
14986 are too few to make the package useful.
</li
>
14988 <p
><strong
>Other changes
</strong
></p
>
14990 <li
>Updated artwork matching http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
14991 <li
>Multi-arch i386/amd64 USB stick ISO available.
</li
>
14992 <li
>Got rid of ispell/wordlist related debconf questions that showed
14993 up for some language options.
</li
>
14994 <li
>Switched to using http.debian.net as APT source by default.
</li
>
14995 <li
>Fixed proxy configuration on Main Server installations.
</li
>
14996 <li
>Changed LTSP setup to ask dpkg to use force-unsafe-io the same way
14997 d-i is doing it.
</li
>
14998 <li
>Made sure root and user passwords were not left behind in the
14999 debconf database after installation on Main Server installations.
</li
>
15000 <li
>Made Roaming Workstation dynamic setup more robust and added draft
15001 script setup-ad-client to hook a Roaming Workstation up to a
15002 Active Directory server instead of a Debian Edu Main Server.
</li
>
15003 <li
>Update system to install needed firmware packages during
15004 installation, to work properly in Wheezy.
</li
>
15005 <li
>Update system to handle hardware quirks (debian-edu-hwsetup).
</li
>
15006 <li
>Corrected PXE installation setup to properly pass selected desktop
15007 and keymap settings to PXE installation clients.
</li
>
15008 <li
>LTSP diskless workstations use sshfs by default, allowing them to
15009 work without adding them to DNS and NIS netgroups for NFS access.
</li
>
15011 <p
><strong
>Known issues
</strong
></p
>
15013 <li
>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
15014 available yet (
698840).
</li
>
15015 <li
>Artwork not enabled for all desktops.
</li
>
15017 <p
><strong
>Where to get it
</strong
></p
>
15019 <p
>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
</p
>
15021 <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
>
15022 <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
>
15023 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso .
</li
>
15026 <p
>The MD5SUM of this image is:
2b161a99d2a848c376d8d04e3854e30c
15027 <br
>The SHA1SUM of this image is:
498922e9c508c0a7ee9dbe1dfe5bf830d779c3c8
</p
>
15029 <p
>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
</p
>
15031 <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
>
15032 <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
>
15033 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso .
</li
>
15036 <p
>The MD5SUM of this image is:
25e808e403a4c15dbef1d13c37d572ac
15037 <br
>The SHA1SUM of this image is:
15ecfc93eb6b4f453b7eb0bc04b6a279262d9721
</p
>
15039 <p
><strong
>How to report bugs
</strong
></p
>
15041 <p
><a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
</a
></p
>
15046 <title>Automatically locate and install required firmware packages on Debian (Isenkram
0.4)
</title>
15047 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html
</link>
15048 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html
</guid>
15049 <pubDate>Tue,
25 Jun
2013 11:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15050 <description><p
>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
15051 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
15052 working. One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
15053 needed to get the hardware on my computer working. Most often this
15054 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
15055 controller or the ethernet card. Today I pushed version
0.4 of the
15056 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram
">Isenkram package
</a
>
15057 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
15058 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
15059 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
15060 debian packages. Here is a test run on my laptop:
</p
>
15062 <p
><pre
>
15063 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
15064 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
15065 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
15066 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
15067 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
15068 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
15071 Preconfiguring packages ...
15072 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
15073 (Reading database ...
259727 files and directories currently installed.)
15074 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
15075 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (
0.28+squeeze1) ...
15077 </pre
></p
>
15079 <p
>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
15080 printed instead:
</p
>
15082 <p
><pre
>
15083 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
15084 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules. exiting
15086 </pre
></p
>
15088 <p
>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
15089 me some time when setting up new machines. :)
</p
>
15091 <p
>So, how does it work? It look at the set of currently loaded
15092 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
15093 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information. Next, it
15094 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
15095 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
15096 requested firmware file. If the package is in the non-free section, a
15097 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
15098 <tt
>apt-get install
</tt
>. The end result is a slightly better working
15101 <p
>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
15102 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
15103 finally fix
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
655507">BTS report
15104 #
655507</a
>. There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
15105 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
15106 from the nearby Debian mirror.
</p
>
15111 <title>The value of a good distro wide test suite...
</title>
15112 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_value_of_a_good_distro_wide_test_suite___.html
</link>
15113 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_value_of_a_good_distro_wide_test_suite___.html
</guid>
15114 <pubDate>Sat,
22 Jun
2013 07:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15115 <description><p
>In the
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
15116 Skolelinux
</a
> project, we include a post-installation test suite,
15117 which check that services are running, working, and return the
15118 expected results. It runs automatically just after the first boot on
15119 test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
15120 installations (using non-test ISOs). It test that the LDAP service is
15121 operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
15122 online resizable, etc, etc. And it check that the PXE service is
15123 configured, which is the topic of this post.
</p
>
15125 <p
>The last week I
've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
15126 Edu Wheezy release. These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
15127 complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
15128 happen all the needed packages need to be on them. Thanks to our test
15129 suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
15130 cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
15131 When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
15132 using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
15133 working packages to get it working. And the packages changed name
15134 from debian-installer-
6.0-netboot-$arch to
15135 debian-installer-
7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
15136 packages during installation. Without our test suite, I suspect we
15137 would never have discovered this before release. Now it is fixed
15138 right after we got the ISOs operational.
</p
>
15140 <p
>Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
15141 administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
15142 test suite using
<tt
>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install
</tt
> and see if
15143 any errors are detected. This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
15144 the problem.
</p
>
15146 <p
>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
15148 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-edu
">#debian-edu on
15149 irc.debian.org
</a
> and the
15150 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/
">debian-edu@
</a
> mailing
15156 <title>Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu
</title>
15157 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html
</link>
15158 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html
</guid>
15159 <pubDate>Mon,
17 Jun
2013 10:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15160 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and
15161 Skolelinux
</a
> distribution have users and contributors all around the
15162 globe. And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
15163 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-edu
">our IRC channel
15164 #debian-edu
</a
> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
15165 worked. We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
15166 help us with translations. And today I managed to get an interview
15167 with him, to learn more about him.
</p
>
15169 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
15171 <p
>I
'm a
25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
15172 which is also my country of origin. Back in
2009, at a New Year
's Eve
15173 party, I had a very nice
<strike
>beer
</strike
> discussion with a
15174 friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
15175 country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
15176 community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
15177 began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
15178 constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
15181 <p
>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
15182 provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
15183 activities. For the last
13 months, I have been the Technical Director
15184 of
<a href=
"http://ceata.org/
">Fundația Ceata
</a
>, which is a free
15185 software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
15186 the only one we have in our country.
</p
>
15188 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
15189 project?
</strong
></p
>
15191 <p
>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
15192 even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
15193 it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
15194 educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
15195 love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
15196 technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
15197 ways to contribute.
</p
>
15199 <p
>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
15200 configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
15201 haven
't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
15202 areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
15203 software in my country is pretty low, I
'll be happy to be the first
15204 one around here advocating for the project
's adoption in educational
15205 environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
15206 for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
15207 from now on, time will tell what I
'll be doing next, but I think I
15208 have a pretty consistent starting point.
</p
>
15210 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
15211 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
15213 <p
>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
15214 maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
15215 took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
15216 Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
15217 time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
15218 with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
15219 out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
15220 it comes to managing a school
's network, for example.
</p
>
15222 <p
>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
15223 availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
15224 scenarios is something I can
't wait to experiment
"into the wild
" (I
15225 only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
15226 lot more I haven
't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
15229 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
15230 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
15232 <p
>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
15233 disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
15234 project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
15235 a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story. I
'd like to see
15236 Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
15237 ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
15238 lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
15239 opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project
's dynamics. Not
15240 to mention it
's a very fun blend to work on!
</p
>
15242 <p
>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
15243 with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
15244 to all blends and derivatives, but it
's an issue we can all work
15247 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
15249 <p
>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
15250 daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
15251 am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
15252 Enlightenment project a lot!),
15253 <a href=
"http://www.claws-mail.org/
">Claws Mail
</a
> due to its ease of
15254 use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
15255 <a href=
"https://launchpad.net/redshift
">Redshift
</a
>, which helps me
15256 get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
15257 stuff in this bag, but I
'll need a blog on my own for doing this!
</p
>
15259 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
15260 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
15262 <p
>Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
15263 now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
15268 <li
>schools would like to get rid of proprietary software
</li
>
15270 <li
>students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
15271 experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
15272 of teenagers more?
</li
>
15274 <li
>there is no
"right one
" when it comes to strategies, but it would
15275 be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
15276 other can get some inspiration from them (I know I
'd promote
15279 <li
>more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
15280 lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
15281 person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)
</li
>
15285 <p
>I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
15286 example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
15287 it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
15288 people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
15289 very hard to convert against their will.
</p
>
15294 <title>Debian Edu interview: Jonathan Carter
</title>
15295 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jonathan_Carter.html
</link>
15296 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jonathan_Carter.html
</guid>
15297 <pubDate>Wed,
12 Jun
2013 09:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15298 <description><p
>There is a certain cross-over between the
15299 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
15300 project
</a
> and
<a href=
"http://www.edubuntu.org/
">the Edubuntu
15301 project
</a
>, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint
15302 effort between the projects. One person with a foot in both camps is
15303 Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.
</p
>
15305 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
15307 <p
>I
'm a South-African free software geek who lives in Cape Town. My
15308 days vary quite a bit since I
'm involved in too many things. As I
'm
15309 getting older I
'm learning how to focus a bit more :)
</p
>
15311 <p
>I
'm also an Edubuntu contributor and I love when there are
15312 opportunities for the Edubuntu and Debian Edu projects to benefit from
15313 each other.
</p
>
15315 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
15316 project?
</strong
></p
>
15318 <p
>I
've been somewhat familiar with the project before, but I think my
15319 first direct exposure to the project was when I met Petter
15320 [Reinholdtsen] and Knut [Yrvin] at the Edubuntu summit in
2005 in
15321 London. They provided great feedback that helped the bootstrapping of
15322 Edubuntu. Back then Edubuntu (and even Ubuntu) was still very new and
15323 it was great getting input from people who have been around longer. I
15324 was also still very excitable and said yes to everything and to this
15325 day I have a big todo list backlog that I
'm catching up with. I think
15326 over the years the relationship between Edubuntu and Debian-Edu has
15327 been gradually improving, although I think there
's a lot that we could
15328 still improve on in terms of working together on packages. I
'm sure
15329 we
'll get there one day.
</p
>
15331 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
15332 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
15334 <p
>Debian itself already has so many advantages. I could go on about
15335 it for pages, but in essence I love that it
's a very honest project
15336 that puts its users first with no hidden agendas and also produces
15337 very high quality work.
</p
>
15339 <p
>I think the advantage of Debian Edu is that it makes many common
15340 set-up tasks simpler so that administrators can get up and running
15341 with a lot less effort and frustration. At the same time I think it
15342 helps to standardise installations in schools so that it
's easier for
15343 community members and commercial suppliers to support.
</p
>
15345 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
15346 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
15348 <p
>I had to re-type this one a few times because I
'm trying to
15349 separate
"disadvantages
" from
"areas that need improvement
" (which is
15350 what I originally rambled on about)
</p
>
15352 <p
>The biggest disadvantage I can think of is lack of manpower. The
15353 project could do so much more if there were more good contributors. I
15354 think some of the problems are external too. Free software and free
15355 content in education is a no-brainer but it takes some time to catch
15356 on. When you
've been working with the same proprietary eco-system for
15357 years and have gotten used to it, it can be hard to adjust to some
15358 concepts in the free software world. It would be nice if there were
15359 more Debian Edu consultants across the world. I
'd love to be one
15360 myself but I
'm already so over-committed that it
's just not possible
15361 currently.
</p
>
15363 <p
>I think the best short-term solution to that large-scale problem is
15364 for schools to be pro-active and share their experiences and grow
15365 their skills in-house. I
'm often saddened to see how much money
15366 educational institutions spend on
3rd party solutions that they don
't
15367 have access to after the service has ended and they could
've gotten so
15368 much more value otherwise by being more self-sustainable and
15369 autonomous.
</p
>
15371 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
15373 <p
>My main laptop dual-boots between Debian and Windows
7. I was
15374 Windows free for years but started dual-booting again last year for
15375 some games which help me focus and relax (Starcraft II in
15376 particular). Gaming support on Linux is improving in leaps and bounds
15377 so I suppose I
'll soon be able to regain that disk space :)
</p
>
15379 <p
>Besides that I rely on Icedove, Chromium, Terminator, Byobu, irssi,
15380 git, Tomboy, KVM, VLC and LibreOffice. Recently I
've been torn on
15381 which desktop environment I like and I
'm taking some refuge in Xfce
15382 while I figure that out. I like tools that keep things simple. I enjoy
15383 Python and shell scripting. I went to an Arduino workshop recently and
15384 it was awesome seeing how easy and simple the IDE software was to get
15385 up and running in Debian compared to the users running Windows and OS
15388 <p
>I also use mc which some people frown upon slightly. I got used to
15389 using Norton Commander in the early
90's and it stuck (I think the
15390 people who sneer at it is just jealous that they don
't know how to use
15393 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
15394 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
15396 <p
>I think trying to force it is unproductive. I also think that in
15397 many cases it
's appropriate for schools to use non-free systems and I
15398 don
't think that there
's any particular moral or ethical problem with
15401 <p
>I do think though that free software can already solve so so many
15402 problems in educational institutions and it
's just a shame not taking
15403 advantage of that.
</p
>
15405 <p
>I also think that some curricula need serious review. For example,
15406 some areas of the world rely heavily on very specific versions of MS
15407 Office, teaching students to parrot menu items instead of learning the
15408 general concepts. I think that
's very unproductive because firstly, MS
15409 Office
's interface changes drastically every few years and on top of
15410 that it also locks in a generation to a product that might not be the
15411 best solution for them.
</p
>
15413 <p
>To answer your question, I believe that the right strategy is to
15414 educate and inform, giving someone the information they require to
15415 make a decision that would work for them.
</p
>
15420 <title>Fixing the Linux black screen of death on machines with Intel HD video
</title>
15421 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_the_Linux_black_screen_of_death_on_machines_with_Intel_HD_video.html
</link>
15422 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_the_Linux_black_screen_of_death_on_machines_with_Intel_HD_video.html
</guid>
15423 <pubDate>Tue,
11 Jun
2013 11:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15424 <description><p
>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
15425 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
15426 or on first boot from the hard disk. I
've seen it once in a while the
15427 last few years, but only recently understood the cause. I
've seen it
15428 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
15429 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops. The system to
15430 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
15431 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead. I do
15432 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
15433 i915 driver used by the
15434 <a href=
"http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv
">Packard Bell
15435 EasyNote LV
</a
>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.
</p
>
15437 <p
>The problem can be worked around two ways. Either by adding
15438 i915.invert_brightness=
1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
15439 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=
1
15440 option when it load the i915 kernel module. On Debian and Ubuntu, it
15441 can be done by running these commands as root:
</p
>
15444 echo options i915 invert_brightness=
1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
15445 update-initramfs -u -k all
15448 <p
>Since March
2012 there is
15449 <a href=
"http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=
4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955
">a
15450 mechanism in the Linux kernel
</a
> to tell the i915 driver which
15451 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
15452 brightness setting automatically. To use it, one need to add a row in
15453 <a href=
"http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c
">the
15454 intel_quirks array
</a
> in the driver source
15455 <tt
>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c
</tt
> (look for
"<tt
>static
15456 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks
</tt
>"), specifying the PCI device
15457 number (vendor number
8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
15460 <p
>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from
<tt
>lspci
15461 -vvnn
</tt
> for the video card in question:
</p
>
15463 <p
><pre
>
15464 00:
02.0 VGA compatible controller [
0300]: Intel Corporation \
15465 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [
8086:
0156] \
15466 (rev
09) (prog-if
00 [VGA controller])
15467 Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [
1025:
0688]
15468 Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
15469 ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
15470 Status: Cap+
66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast
>TAbort- \
15471 <TAbort-
<MAbort-
>SERR-
<PERR- INTx-
15473 Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ
42
15474 Region
0: Memory at c2000000 (
64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=
4M]
15475 Region
2: Memory at b0000000 (
64-bit, prefetchable) [size=
256M]
15476 Region
4: I/O ports at
4000 [size=
64]
15477 Expansion ROM at
<unassigned
> [disabled]
15478 Capabilities:
<access denied
>
15479 Kernel driver in use: i915
15480 </pre
></p
>
15482 <p
>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:
</p
>
15484 <p
><pre
>
15485 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
15487 /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
15488 {
0x0156,
0x1025,
0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
15491 </pre
></p
>
15493 <p
>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
15494 <tt
>modinfo i915
</tt
>), information about hardware needing the
15495 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
15496 <a href=
"http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel
">dri-devel
15497 (at) lists.freedesktop.org
</a
> mailing list to reach the kernel
15498 developers. But my email about the laptop sent
2013-
06-
03 have not
15500 <a href=
"http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/
2013-June/thread.html
">the
15501 web archive for the mailing list
</a
>, so I suspect they do not accept
15502 emails from non-subscribers. Because of this, I sent my patch also to
15503 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
15504 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
710938">BTS report #
710938</a
>, to make
15505 sure the patch is not lost.
</p
>
15507 <p
>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
15508 with this problem working properly with Linux. If you use Gnome, your
15509 worries should be over at this point. But if you use KDE, there is
15510 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
15511 the screen during login. I
've reported it to Debian as
15512 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
711237">BTS report #
711237</a
>, and
15513 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
15514 this. Perhaps you can help? Perhaps you know what the Gnome
15515 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
15516 developers? Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
15517 during login? If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
15518 you do not know how to update BTS).
</p
>
15520 <p
>Update
2013-
07-
19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
15521 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
15522 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
15523 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
15524 backlight.
</p
>
15529 <title>Third alpha release of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy
</title>
15530 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</link>
15531 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</guid>
15532 <pubDate>Mon,
10 Jun
2013 22:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15533 <description><p
>The third wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
15534 today. This is the release announcement:
</p
>
15536 <p
><strong
>New features for Debian Edu
7.0.0 alpha2 released
15537 2013-
06-
10</strong
></p
>
15539 <p
>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7.0.0 edu
15540 alpha2, based on Debian with codename
"Wheezy
".
</p
>
15542 <p
><strong
>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</strong
></p
>
15544 <p
><a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu, also known as
15545 Skolelinux
</a
>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
15546 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
15547 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
15548 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
15549 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
15550 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
15551 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
15552 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
15553 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
15554 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
15556 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html
">more
15557 than
60 educational software packages
</a
> and more are available from
15558 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
15559 and Xfce desktop environment.
</p
>
15561 <p
>This is the third test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
15562 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
15563 Squeeze release.
</p
>
15565 <p
><strong
>Software updates
</strong
></p
>
15569 <li
>Iceweasel was updated from
10 to
17. (DSA
2699-
1)
15570 <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).
15571 <li
>Switched xrdp on thin client servers to use tightvncserver instead of xvnc4.
15572 <li
>Now install software oscilloscope xoscope by default.
15573 <li
>Now install music tools gtick, lingot and pianobooster by default.
15577 <p
><strong
>Other changes
</strong
></p
>
15581 <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.
15582 <li
>Updated translation of the installation.
15583 <li
>New Romanian translation.
15584 <li
>Fix security problem causing root and first user password to no longer show up in /var/cache/debconf/templates.dat.
15585 <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).
15586 <li
>Made roaming workstation setup more robust in non-Debian Edu environments.
15587 <li
>New script debian-edu-bless to transform a Debian installation to a Debian Edu profile.
15588 <li
>Adjust Iceweasel setup to improve performance when $HOME is on NFS.
15589 <li
>More testsuite tests.
15590 <li
>Make automatic proxy configuration more robust.
15591 <li
>Adjust GOsa² GUI configuration.
15593 <li
>Update thin client and diskless workstation setup to work with
15594 LTSP in Wheezy.
</li
>
15596 <li
>Diskless workstations now run out of the box -- no need to set
15597 them up with GOsa².
</li
>
15599 <li
>Update IMAP server setup.
</li
>
15601 <li
>Fix login into Skolelinux Backup Tool (Closed in
15602 slbackup-php/
0.4.4-
1: #
700257: slbackup-php: Fails to submit correctly
15603 entered password).
</li
>
15607 <p
><strong
>Known issues
</strong
></p
>
15611 <li
>DVD binary and source images are not yet ready.
</li
>
15613 <li
>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
15614 available yet (Open in gosa/
2.7.4-
4: #
698840: gosa-plugin-ldapmanager:
15615 missing import feature).
</li
>
15617 <li
>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others).
</li
>
15619 <li
>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons (Closed: #
502192: menu-xdg: invents
15620 own icon names instead of using existing). This will remain
15621 unfixed.
</li
>
15625 <p
><strong
>Where to get it
</strong
></p
>
15627 <p
>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
</p
>
15631 <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
>
15633 <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
>
15635 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso .
</li
>
15639 <p
>The MD5SUM of this image is:
27bbcace407743382f3c42c08dbe8178
15640 <br
>The SHA1SUM of this image is: e35f7d7908566cd3075375b3721fa10ee420d419
</p
>
15642 <p
><strong
>How to report bugs
</strong
></p
>
15644 <p
><a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
</a
>
15649 <title>Is there a PHP expert in the building? Debian Edu need help!
</title>
15650 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_there_a_PHP_expert_in_the_building___Debian_Edu_need_help_.html
</link>
15651 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_there_a_PHP_expert_in_the_building___Debian_Edu_need_help_.html
</guid>
15652 <pubDate>Wed,
5 Jun
2013 17:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15653 <description><p
>Here is a call for help from the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project.
15654 We have two problems blocking the release of the Wheezy version we
15655 hope to get released soon. The two problems require some with PHP
15656 skills, and we seem to lack anyone with both time and PHP skills in
15661 <li
>It is impossible to log into the slbackup web interface
15662 (slbackup-php) using the root user and password. This is
15663 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
700257">BTS report #
700257</a
>.
15664 This used to work, but stopped working some time since Squeeze.
15665 Perhaps some obsolete PHP feature was used?
</li
>
15667 <li
>It is not possible to
"mass import
" user lists in Gosa, neither
15668 using ldif nor using CSV files. The feature was disabled after a
15669 major rewrite of Gosa, and need to be ported to the new system.
15670 This is
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
698840">BTS report
15671 #
698840</a
>.
</li
>
15675 <p
>If you can help us, please join us on IRC
15676 (
<a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-edu
">#debian-edu on
15677 irc.debian.org
</a
>) and provide patches via the BTS.
</p
>
15682 <title>Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier
</title>
15683 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html
</link>
15684 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html
</guid>
15685 <pubDate>Tue,
4 Jun
2013 10:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15686 <description><p
>It has been a while since my last English
15687 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>
15688 interview last November. But the developers and translators are still
15689 pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
15690 time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
15691 in the project, Cédric Boutillier.
</p
>
15693 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
15695 <p
>I am
34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
15696 professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
15697 mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
15698 probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.
</p
>
15700 <p
>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
15701 and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
15702 packaging, publicity and translation.
</p
>
15704 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
15705 project?
</strong
></p
>
15707 <p
>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
15708 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals
">the
15709 Debian Edu manual
</a
> for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
15710 then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
15713 <p
>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
15714 virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
15715 shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
15716 how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.
</p
>
15718 <p
>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
15719 ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
15720 by
<a href=
"https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/
">GOsa²
</a
>. What pleased
15721 me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
15722 there were many
"traditional
" educative software to learn languages,
15723 to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
15724 artistic skills with music (
<a href=
"http://ardour.org/
">Ardour
</a
>,
15725 <a href=
"http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
">Audacity
</a
>) and
15726 movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
15727 <a href=
"http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/
">Stopmotion
</a
>).
</p
>
15729 <p
>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
15730 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-edu
">#debian-edu
</a
>.
15731 Unfortunately, I don
't much time to get more involved in this
15732 beautiful project.
</p
>
15734 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
15735 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
15737 <p
>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
15738 community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
15739 fact that it provides a solution ready to use.
</p
>
15741 <p
>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
15742 distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
15743 of educational free software.
</p
>
15745 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
15746 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
15748 <p
>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
15749 project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
15750 not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
15751 solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
15752 is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.
</p
>
15754 <p
>One can find support from a company by looking at
15755 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp
">the
15756 wiki dokumentation
</a
>, where some countries already have a number of
15757 companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
15758 Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
15759 for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
15760 consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
15761 support for Debian Edu as well.
</p
>
15763 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
15765 <p
>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
15766 most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
15767 scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice. I am
15768 also using the mathematical software
15769 <a href=
"http://www.scilab.org/en/scilab/about
">Scilab
</a
> and
15770 <a href=
"http://www.sagemath.org/index.html
">Sage
</a
> (built from
15771 source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
15773 <p
><strong
>Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
15774 using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
15775 statistics?
</strong
></p
>
15777 <p
>I do not have any
"nice
" recommendations for statistics. At our
15778 university, we use both
<a href=
"http://www.r-project.org/
">R
</a
> and
15779 Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
15780 geometry, there are nice programs:
</p
>
15784 <li
><a href=
"http://www.drgeo.eu/
">drgeo
</a
> and
15785 <a href=
"http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/kig
">kig
</a
> to do
15786 constructions in planar geometry
15788 <li
><a href=
"http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/kali.html
">kali
</a
>
15789 to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
15790 groups), although the interface looks a bit old.
</li
>
15794 <p
>I like also
15795 <a href=
"http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/cantor
">cantor
</a
>, which
15796 provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
15797 <a href=
"http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Octave
">Octave
</a
>, etc...
</p
>
15799 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
15800 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
15802 <p
>My suggestions would be to
</p
>
15806 <li
>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.
</li
>
15808 <li
>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
15809 well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
15810 OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.
</li
>
15812 <li
>advertise the living and strong community around the project.
</li
>
15814 <li
>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
15822 <title>Educational applications included in Debian Edu / Skolelinux (the screenshot collection :-)
</title>
15823 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html
</link>
15824 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html
</guid>
15825 <pubDate>Sat,
1 Jun
2013 23:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15826 <description><p
>Included in
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
15827 Skolelinux
</a
>, there are quite a lot of educational software.
15828 Created to help teachers teach, and pupils learn. We have tried to
15829 tag them all using debtags use::learning and role::program, and using
15830 the debtags I was happy to be able to create a collage of the
15831 educational software packages installed by default, sorted by the
15832 debtag field. Here it is. Click on a image to learn more about the
15835 <!-- 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 --
>
15837 <p
><strong
>field::arts
</strong
></p
>
15839 <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
>
15840 <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
>
15841 <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
>
15842 <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
>
15843 <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
>
15844 <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
>
15845 <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
>
15846 <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
>
15847 <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
>
15848 <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
>
15849 <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
>
15850 <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
>
15851 <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
>
15852 <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
>
15855 <p
><strong
>field::astronomy
</strong
></p
>
15857 <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
>
15858 <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
>
15859 <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
>
15860 <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
>
15861 <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
>
15862 <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
>
15865 <p
><strong
>field::biology:structural
</strong
></p
>
15867 <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
>
15870 <p
><strong
>field::chemistry
</strong
></p
>
15872 <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
>
15873 <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
>
15874 <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
>
15875 <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
>
15876 <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
>
15877 <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
>
15878 <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
>
15879 <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
>
15880 <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
>
15881 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=viewmol
'>[viewmol]
</a
>
15882 <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
>
15885 <p
><strong
>field::electronics
</strong
></p
>
15887 <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
>
15888 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=gpsim
'>[gpsim]
</a
>
15891 <p
><strong
>field::geography
</strong
></p
>
15893 <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
>
15894 <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
>
15895 <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
>
15898 <p
><strong
>field::linguistics
</strong
></p
>
15900 <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
>
15901 <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
>
15902 <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
>
15903 <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
>
15904 <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
>
15907 <p
><strong
>field::mathematics
</strong
></p
>
15909 <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
>
15910 <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
>
15911 <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
>
15912 <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
>
15913 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=geomview
'>[geomview]
</a
>
15914 <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
>
15915 <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
>
15916 <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
>
15917 <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
>
15918 <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
>
15919 <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
>
15920 <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
>
15921 <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
>
15922 <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
>
15923 <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
>
15924 <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
>
15925 <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
>
15928 <p
><strong
>field::physics
</strong
></p
>
15930 <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
>
15931 <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
>
15934 <p
><strong
>field::TODO
</strong
></p
>
15936 <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
>
15937 <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
>
15938 <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
>
15939 <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
>
15940 <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
>
15941 <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
>
15942 <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
>
15943 <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
>
15944 <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
>
15945 <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
>
15948 <p
>In total,
61 applications.
3 of them lacked screen shots on
15949 <a href=
"http://screenshot.debian.net
">screenshot.debian.net
</a
>. If
15950 you know of some packages we should install by default, please let us
15951 know on
<a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-edu
">IRC, #debian-edu
15952 on irc.debian.org
</a
>, or our
15953 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/
">mailing list
15954 debian-edu@
</a
>.
</p
>
15959 <title>How to install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows
8</title>
15960 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8.html
</link>
15961 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8.html
</guid>
15962 <pubDate>Mon,
27 May
2013 15:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15963 <description><p
>Two days ago, I asked
15964 <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
15965 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
15966 preinstalled with Windows
8</a
>. I found a solution, but am horrified
15967 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
15968 and Windows
8.
</p
>
15970 <p
>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
15971 secure booting or fast boot. I suspect fast boot was the problem,
15972 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
15973 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
15974 enough to tell.
</p
>
15976 <p
>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
15977 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive! This is as far as I
15978 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
15979 without accepting the Windows
8 license agreement. I am told (and
15980 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
15981 firmware setup once booted into Windows
8. But as I believe the terms
15982 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
15983 was never an alternative. I do not enter agreements I do not intend
15984 to follow.
</p
>
15986 <p
>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
15987 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
15988 work. But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
15989 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows
8 certified laptops. Is
15990 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
15991 it close to impossible for
"normal
" users to install Linux without
15992 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms? Or at least not
15993 without risking to loose the warranty?
</p
>
15995 <p
>I
've updated the
15996 <a href=
"http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv
">Linux Laptop
15997 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV
</a
>, to ensure the next person
15998 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
16001 <p
>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
16002 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.
</p
>
16007 <title>How can I install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows
8?
</title>
16008 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html
</link>
16009 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html
</guid>
16010 <pubDate>Sat,
25 May
2013 18:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16011 <description><p
>I
've run into quite a problem the last few days. I bought three
16012 new laptops for my parents and a few others. I bought Packard Bell
16013 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer. But I
16014 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it. The
16015 computer is preinstalled with Windows
8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
16016 instead of a BIOS to boot.
</p
>
16018 <p
>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
16019 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick. I have yet
16020 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work. when I turn on
16021 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
16022 the normal boot menu. I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
16023 USB stick booting. When booting, it first ask for the language to
16024 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
16025 Windows
8 terms of use. As these terms are completely unacceptable to
16026 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
16027 to get it to boot the Linux installer.
</p
>
16029 <p
>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
16030 <a href=
"http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv
">Packard Bell
16031 EasyNote LV
</a
> model. If you have any idea how to get Linux
16032 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
16033 page. If I can
't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
16034 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.
</p
>
16036 <p
>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
16037 using UEFI and
"secure boot
" by making it impossible to install Linux
16038 on new Laptops?
</p
>
16043 <title>How to transform a Debian based system to a Debian Edu installation
</title>
16044 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_transform_a_Debian_based_system_to_a_Debian_Edu_installation.html
</link>
16045 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_transform_a_Debian_based_system_to_a_Debian_Edu_installation.html
</guid>
16046 <pubDate>Fri,
17 May
2013 11:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16047 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> is
16048 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools. It
16049 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
16050 pupils in the primary schools. It provide both the central server,
16051 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
16052 educational software. The project was founded almost
12 years ago,
16053 2001-
07-
02. If you want to support the project, which is in need for
16054 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
16055 <a href=
"http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html
">please
16056 donate some money
</a
>.
16058 <p
>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
16059 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
16060 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation. It isn
't very
16061 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
16062 the Debian Edu installer.
</p
>
16064 <p
>The script,
16065 <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/
>
16066 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
16067 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
16068 into a Debian Edu Workstation:
</p
>
16072 <li
>Add skolelinux related APT sources.
</li
>
16073 <li
>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.
</li
>
16074 <li
>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
16075 our configuration.
</li
>
16076 <li
>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
16077 /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
16078 according to the profile specified in the config above,
16079 overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.
</li
>
16080 <li
>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
16081 that could not be done using preseeding.
</li
>
16082 <li
>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.
</li
>
16086 <p
>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
16087 replicated like this. Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
16088 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
16089 the needed packages.
</p
>
16091 <p
>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
16092 setting up
<a href=
"http://www.raspberrypi.org
">Raspberry Pi
</a
> as a
16093 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
16094 <a href=
"http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage
">Raspbian
</a
> installation and
16095 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
16096 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).
</p
>
16098 <p
>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
16099 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
16100 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:
</p
>
16102 <p
><pre
>
16103 PROFILE=
"Roaming-Workstation
"
16104 DESKTOP=
"lxde
"
16105 </pre
></p
>
16107 <p
>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
16108 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
16109 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
16115 <title>Second alpha release of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy
</title>
16116 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</link>
16117 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</guid>
16118 <pubDate>Tue,
14 May
2013 23:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16119 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
16120 project
</a
> is making great progress and made its second Wheezy based
16121 release today. This is the release announcement:
</p
>
16123 <p
><strong
>New features for Debian Edu
7.0.0 alpha1 released
16124 2013-
05-
14</strong
></p
>
16126 <p
>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7.0.0 edu
16127 alpha1, based on
<a href=
"http://www.debian.org
">Debian
</a
> with
16128 codename
"Wheezy
".
</p
>
16130 <p
><strong
>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</strong
></p
>
16132 <p
>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
16133 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
16134 configured school network. Immediatly after installation a school
16135 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
16136 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
16137 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
16138 initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all
16139 other machines can be installed via the network.
</p
>
16141 <p
>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
16142 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
16143 version compared to the Squeeze release.
</p
>
16145 <p
><strong
>Software updates
</strong
></p
>
16147 <li
>Install freemind (
0.9.0) by default, and stop installing vym by
16148 default.
</li
>
16149 <li
>Install chromium (
26.0.1410.43) by default.
</li
>
16150 <li
>Install goplay (
0.5-
1.1) to make golearn available by default.
</li
>
16151 <li
>Updated support for Japanese input methods, now based on
16152 ibus-anthy.
</li
>
16155 <p
><strong
>Other changes
</strong
></p
>
16158 <li
>Switched default file system from ext3 to ext4 for speed and
16159 reliability improvements.
</li
>
16160 <li
>Got rid of unwanted winbind daemon and PAM setup activated because
16161 of
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
706434">706434</a
>.
</li
>
16162 <li
>Extended and improved the testsuite tests to detect more possible
16163 problems.
</li
>
16164 <li
>Corrected proxy handling to not set http_proxy to a bogus
16165 direct:// URL.
</li
>
16166 <li
>Corrected proxy setup for diskless workstations.
</li
>
16167 <li
>Corrected PXE setup to use our updated udebs during installation.
</li
>
16168 <li
>Made installation handling of low entropy level more robust.
</li
>
16169 <li
>Create larger partitions for Roaming workstations and Thin client
16170 servers, to make room for all the software installed.
</li
>
16171 <li
>Fix bug in Roaming workstation PAM setup, making it impossible to
16172 log in (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
706753">706753</a
>).
</li
>
16175 <p
><strong
>Known issues
</strong
></p
>
16178 <li
>IP resolution for the local hostname give useless IPv6 address
16179 (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
705900">705900</a
>). Only install
16180 libnss-myhostname on roaming workstations until it is fixed.
</li
>
16181 <li
>DVD images are not yet ready.
</li
>
16182 <li
>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
16183 available yet (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
698840">698840</a
>).
</li
>
16184 <li
>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others).
</li
>
16185 <li
>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons.
</li
>
16186 <li
>LXDE menu lacks entry for changing GOsa password
16187 (website). Installing gosa-desktop will be an option.
</li
>
16188 <li
>Backup configuration via web interface is impossible due to
16189 password submission problem
16190 (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
700257">700257</a
>).
</li
>
16194 <p
><strong
>Where to get it
</strong
></p
>
16196 <p
>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
</p
>
16199 <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
>
16200 <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
>
16201 <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
>
16205 <p
>The MD5SUM of this image is:
685ed76c1aa8e44b12d3fde21faf450b
</p
>
16207 <p
>The SHA1SUM of this image is:
6c874de157024da13e115bab29c068080a11ec4c
</p
>
16209 <p
><strong
>How to report bugs
</strong
></p
>
16211 <p
><a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
</a
></p
>
16216 <title>Debian, the Linux distribution of choice for LEGO designers?
</title>
16217 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian__the_Linux_distribution_of_choice_for_LEGO_designers_.html
</link>
16218 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian__the_Linux_distribution_of_choice_for_LEGO_designers_.html
</guid>
16219 <pubDate>Sat,
11 May
2013 20:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16220 <description><P
>In January,
16221 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html
">I
16222 announced a
</a
> new
<a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-lego
">IRC
16223 channel #debian-lego
</a
>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
16224 community interested in
<a href=
"http://www.lego.com/
">LEGO
</a
>, the
16225 marvellous construction system from Denmark. We also created
16226 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners
">a wiki page
</a
> to have
16227 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes. And several
16228 people showed up to help. I was very happy to see the effect of my
16229 call. Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
16230 <a href=
"http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego
">hardware::hobby:lego
</a
>
16231 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count
10 packages related to
16232 LEGO and
<a href=
"http://mindstorms.lego.com/
">Mindstorms
</a
>:
</p
>
16234 <p
><table
>
16235 <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
>
16236 <tr
><td
><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad
">leocad
</a
></td
><td
>virtual brick CAD software
</td
></tr
>
16237 <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
>
16238 <tr
><td
><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd
">lnpd
</a
></td
><td
>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS
</td
></tr
>
16239 <tr
><td
><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc
">nbc
</a
></td
><td
>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
</td
></tr
>
16240 <tr
><td
><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc
">nqc
</a
></td
><td
>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX
</td
></tr
>
16241 <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
>
16242 <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
>
16243 <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
>
16244 <tr
><td
><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n
">t2n
</a
></td
><td
>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
</td
></tr
>
16245 </table
></p
>
16247 <p
>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
16248 currently available in Jessie/testing. leocad is so far only
16249 available in experimental.
</p
>
16251 <p
>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
16252 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
16253 for LEGO designers.
</p
>
16258 <title>Debian Wheezy is out - and Debian Edu / Skolelinux should soon follow! #newinwheezy
</title>
16259 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Wheezy_is_out___and_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_should_soon_follow___newinwheezy.html
</link>
16260 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Wheezy_is_out___and_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_should_soon_follow___newinwheezy.html
</guid>
16261 <pubDate>Sun,
5 May
2013 07:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16262 <description><p
>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
16263 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2013/
20130504">release announcement
16264 for Debian Wheezy
</a
> was waiting in my mail box. This is a great
16265 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
16268 <p
>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
16269 in particular make me very happy to see included. The
16270 <a href=
"http://scratch.mit.edu/
">Scratch
</a
> program, made famous by
16271 the
<a href=
"http://www.code.org/
">Teach kids code
</a
> movement, is
16272 included for the first time. Alongside similar programs like
16273 <a href=
"http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/
">kturtle
</a
> and
16274 <a href=
"http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art
">turtleart
</a
>,
16275 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
16276 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
16277 computer. Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
16280 <p
>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
16281 Edu/Skolelinux release too. The
16282 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/
2013/
04/msg00132.html
">first
16283 alpha release
</a
> went out last week, and the next should soon
16289 <title>First alpha release of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy
</title>
16290 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</link>
16291 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</guid>
16292 <pubDate>Fri,
26 Apr
2013 08:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16293 <description><p
>The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made
16294 its first Wheezy based release today. This is the release
16295 announcement:
</p
>
16297 <p
><strong
>New features for Debian Edu ~
7.0.0 alpha0 released
16298 2013-
04-
26</strong
></p
>
16300 <p
>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux ~
7.0.0
16301 edu alpha0, based on Debian with codename
"Wheezy
".
</p
>
16303 <p
><strong
>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</strong
></p
>
16305 <p
><a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu, also known as
16306 Skolelinux
</a
>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
16307 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
16308 network. Immediatly after installation a school server running all
16309 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
16310 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
16311 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
16312 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
16313 installed via the network.
</p
>
16315 <p
>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
16316 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
16317 version compared to the Squeeze release.
</p
>
16319 <p
><strong
>Software updates
</strong
></p
>
16322 <li
>Everything which is new in Debian Wheezy, eg:
16324 <li
>Linux kernel
3.2.x
</li
>
16325 <li
>Desktop environments KDE
"Plasma
" 4.8.4, GNOME
3.4, and LXDE
4
16326 (KDE is installed by default; to choose GNOME or LXDE: see
16327 manual.)
</li
>
16328 <li
>Web browser Iceweasel
10 ESR
</li
>
16329 <li
>LibreOffice
3.5.4</li
>
16330 <li
>LTSP
5.4.2</li
>
16331 <li
>GOsa
2.7.4</li
>
16332 <li
>CUPS print system
1.5.3</li
>
16333 <li
>Educational toolbox GCompris
12.01</li
>
16334 <li
>Music creator Rosegarden
12.04</li
>
16335 <li
>Image editor Gimp
2.8.2</li
>
16336 <li
>Virtual universe Celestia
1.6.1</li
>
16337 <li
>Virtual stargazer Stellarium
0.11.3</li
>
16338 <li
>Scratch visual programming environment
1.4.0.6</li
>
16339 <li
>New version of debian-installer from Debian Wheezy, see
16340 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual
">installation
16341 manual
</a
> for more details.
</li
>
16342 <li
>Debian Wheezy includes about
37000 packages available for
16343 installation.
</li
>
16344 <li
>More information about Debian Wheezy
7.0 is provided in the
16345 <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
>
16346 </ul
></li
>
16349 <p
><strong
>Documentation
</strong
></p
>
16351 <li
>The (
<a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy
">English
</a
>) Debian Edu Wheezy Manual is fully translated to
16352 German, French, Italian and Danish. Partly translated versions exist
16353 for Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
</li
>
16356 <p
><Strong
>LDAP related changes
</strong
></p
>
16358 <li
>Slight changes to some objects and acls to have more types to
16359 choose from when adding systems in GOsa. Now systems can be of type
16360 server, workstation, printer, terminal or netdevice.
</li
>
16363 <p
><strong
>Other changes
</strong
></p
>
16365 <li
>LTSP clients start as diskless workstation / thin client can be
16366 configured via command line argument -- or individually adding an
16367 entry in lts.conf or LDAP.
<li
>
16368 <li
>GOsa gui: Now some options that seemed to be available, but are non
16369 functional, are greyed out (or are not clickable). Some tabs are
16370 completely hidden to the end user, others even to the GOsa admin.
</li
>
16373 <p
><strong
>Regressions
</strong
></p
>
16375 <li
>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv) available
16379 <p
><strong
>No updated artwork
</strong
></p
>
16382 <li
>Updated artwork which is visible during installation, in the login
16383 screen and as desktop wallpaper is still missing or the same as we
16384 had for our Squeeze based release.
</li
>
16387 <p
><strong
>Where to get it
</strong
></p
>
16389 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
16391 <li
><a href=
"ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/
">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/
</a
></li
>
16392 <li
><a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/
">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/
</a
></li
>
16393 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/
</li
>
16396 <p
>The MD5SUM of this image is: c5e773ddafdaa4f48c409c682f598b6c
</p
>
16398 <p
>The SHA1SUM of this image is:
25934fabb9b7d20235499a0a51f08ce6c54215f2
</p
>
16400 <p
><strong
>How to report bugs
</strong
></p
>
16402 <p
><a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
</a
></p
>
16407 <title>First Debian Edu / Skolelinux developer gathering in
2013 take place in Trondheim
</title>
16408 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_developer_gathering_in_2013_take_place_in_Trondheim.html
</link>
16409 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_developer_gathering_in_2013_take_place_in_Trondheim.html
</guid>
16410 <pubDate>Tue,
16 Apr
2013 15:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16411 <description><p
>This years first
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux /
16412 Debian Edu
</a
> developer gathering take place the coming weekend in Trondheim.
16413 Details about the gathering can be found
16414 <a href=
"http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/
2013-
04-
19-
21-Trondheim
">on
16415 the FRiSK wiki
</a
>. The dates are
19-
21th of April
2013, and online
16416 participation for those unable to make it in person is very welcome,
16417 and I plan to participate online myself as I could not leave Oslo this
16420 <p
>The focus of the gathering is to work on the web pages and project
16421 infrastructure, and to continue the work on the Wheezy based Debian
16422 Edu release.
</p
>
16424 <p
>See you on
<a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-edu
">IRC, #debian-edu on irc.debian.org,
</a
> then?
</p
>
16429 <title>Isenkram
0.2 finally in the Debian archive
</title>
16430 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html
</link>
16431 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html
</guid>
16432 <pubDate>Wed,
3 Apr
2013 23:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16433 <description><p
>Today the
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram
">Isenkram
16434 package
</a
> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
16435 for many months. I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
16436 2013-
01-
27, and today it was accepted into the archive.
</p
>
16438 <p
>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
16439 install to work with a pluggable hardware device. The suggestion pop
16440 up when the device is plugged in. For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
16441 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
16442 the NXT controller. Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
16448 <title>Change the font, save the world (and save some money in the process)
</title>
16449 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Change_the_font__save_the_world__and_save_some_money_in_the_process_.html
</link>
16450 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Change_the_font__save_the_world__and_save_some_money_in_the_process_.html
</guid>
16451 <pubDate>Tue,
26 Mar
2013 15:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
16452 <description><p
>Would you like to help the environment and save money at the same
16453 time, without much sacrifice? A small step could be to change the
16454 font you use when printing.
</p
>
16456 <p
>Three years ago,
16457 <a href=
"http://arstechnica.com/business/
2010/
04/last-year-printer-comparison-website/
">Ars
16458 Technica
</a
> reported how the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
16459 changed their default front from
16460 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial
">Arial
</a
> to
16461 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Gothic
">Century
16462 Gothic
</a
> to save money. The Century Gothic font uses
30% less toner
16463 than Arial to print the same text. In other word, you could cut your
16464 toner costs by
30% (or actually, increase your toner supply life time
16465 by more than
30%), by simply changing the default font used in your
16468 <p
>But it is not quite obvious how much one will save by switching.
16469 The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay said it used $
100,
000 per year
16470 on ink and toner cartridges, according to
16471 <a href=
"http://www.twincities.com/ci_14833097
">a report from
16472 TwinCities.com
</a
>, and expected to save between $
5,
000 and $
10,
000
16473 per year by asking staff and students to use a different font. Not
16474 all PDFs and documents are created internally, and those from external
16475 sources will most likely still use a different font. Also, the
16476 Century Gothic font is slightly wider than Arial, and thus might use
16477 more sheets of paper to print the same text, so the total saving
16478 depend on the documents printed.
</p
>
16480 <p
>But it is definitely something to consider, if you want to reduce
16481 the amount of trash, decrease the amount of toner used in the world,
16482 and save some money in the process.
</p
>
16484 <p
>Update
2013-
04-
10: If you want to know how much ink/toner could be
16485 saved when switching between fonts, Inkfarm got a
16486 <a href=
"http://www.inkfarm.com/What-the-Font
">service to calculate the
16487 difference between font pairs
</a
>. They also
16488 <a href=
"http://www.inkfarm.com/Recommended-Ink-Saving-Fonts---
">recommend
16489 which fonts to use
</a
> to save ink. Check it out. :) While updating
16490 this blog post, I also came across a blog post from InkCloners,
16491 <a href=
"http://inkcloners.com/blog/ink-cartridges/change-fonts-to-save-ink-costs/
">listing
16492 the fonts they recommend
</a
>, with Centory Gothic at the top.
</p
>
16497 <title>Typesetting a short story using docbook for PDF, HTML and EPUB
</title>
16498 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_a_short_story_using_docbook_for_PDF__HTML_and_EPUB.html
</link>
16499 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_a_short_story_using_docbook_for_PDF__HTML_and_EPUB.html
</guid>
16500 <pubDate>Sun,
24 Mar
2013 17:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
16501 <description><p
>A few days ago, during a discussion in
16502 <a href=
"http://www.efn.no/
">EFN
</a
> about interesting books to read
16503 about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
16504 the
1968 short story Kodémus by
16505 <a href=
"http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/
">Tore Åge Bringsværd
</a
>
16506 came up. The text was only available in old paper books, and thus not
16507 easily available for current and future generations. Some of the
16508 people participating in the discussion contacted the author, and
16509 reported back
2013-
03-
19 that the author was OK with releasing the
16510 short story using a
<a href=
"http://www.creativecommons.org/
">Creative
16511 Commons
</a
> license. The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
16512 were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.
</p
>
16514 <p
>As I already had some experience formatting text in my project to
16515 provide a Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence
16516 Lessig, I chipped in and set up a
16517 <a href=
"http://www.docbook.org/
">DocBook
</a
> processing framework to
16518 generate PDF, HTML and EPUB version of the short story. The tools to
16519 transform DocBook to different formats are already in my Linux
16520 distribution of choice,
<a href=
"http://www.debian.org/
">Debian
</a
>, so
16521 all I had to do was to use the
16522 <a href=
"http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/
">dblatex
</a
>,
16523 <a href=
"http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README
">dbtoepub
</a
>
16524 and
<a href=
"https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/
">xmlto
</a
> tools to do the
16525 conversion. After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
16527 <a href=
"http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets
">docbook-xsl
</a
>),
16528 to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
16529 nicer
&lt;variablelist
&gt; typesetting, but that is just a minor
16530 technical detail.
</p
>
16532 <p
>There were a few challenges, of course. We want to typeset the
16533 short story to look like the original, and that require fairly good
16534 control over the layout. The original short story have three
16535 parts/scenes separated by a single horizontally centred star (*), and
16536 the paragraphs do not contain only flowing text, but dialogs and text
16537 that started on a new line in the middle of the paragraph.
</p
>
16539 <p
>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
16540 single star in it, ie
&lt;para
&gt;*
&lt;/para
&gt;, but it made sure a
16541 placeholder indicated where the scene shifted. This did not look too
16542 good without the centring. The next approach was to create a new
16543 preprocessor directive
&lt;?newscene?
&gt;, mapping to
"&lt;hr/
&gt;
"
16544 for HTML and
"&lt;fo:block text-align=
"center
"&gt;
&lt;fo:leader
16545 leader-pattern=
"rule
" rule-thickness=
"0.5pt
"/
&gt;
&lt;/fo:block
&gt;
"
16546 for FO/PDF output (did not try to implement this in dblatex, as we had
16547 switched at this time). The HTML XSL file looked like this:
</p
>
16549 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
16550 &lt;?xml version=
'1.0'?
&gt;
16551 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl=
"http://www.w3.org/
1999/XSL/Transform
" version=
'1.0'&gt;
16552 &lt;xsl:template match=
"processing-instruction(
'newscene
')
"&gt;
16553 &lt;hr/
&gt;
16554 &lt;/xsl:template
&gt;
16555 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet
&gt;
16556 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
16558 <p
>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:
</p
>
16560 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
16561 &lt;?xml version=
'1.0'?
&gt;
16562 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl=
"http://www.w3.org/
1999/XSL/Transform
" version=
'1.0'&gt;
16563 &lt;xsl:template match=
"processing-instruction(
'newscene
')
"&gt;
16564 &lt;fo:block text-align=
"center
"&gt;
16565 &lt;fo:leader leader-pattern=
"rule
" rule-thickness=
"0.5pt
"/
&gt;
16566 &lt;/fo:block
&gt;
16567 &lt;/xsl:template
&gt;
16568 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet
&gt;
16569 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
16571 <p
>Finally, I came across the
&lt;bridgehead
&gt; tag, which seem to be
16572 a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced
&lt;?newscene?
&gt;
16573 with
&lt;bridgehead
&gt;*
&lt;/bridgehead
&gt;. It isn
't centred, but we
16574 can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn
't
16577 <p
>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
16578 linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
16579 directive
&lt;?linebreak?
&gt;, mapping to
&lt;br/
&gt; in HTML, and
16580 &lt;fo:block/
&gt; in FO/PDF. I suspect there are better ways to do
16581 this, and welcome ideas and patches on github. The HTML XSL file now
16582 look like this:
</p
>
16584 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
16585 &lt;?xml version=
'1.0'?
&gt;
16586 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl=
"http://www.w3.org/
1999/XSL/Transform
" version=
'1.0'&gt;
16587 &lt;xsl:template match=
"processing-instruction(
'linebreak)
"&gt;
16588 &lt;br/
&gt;
16589 &lt;/xsl:template
&gt;
16590 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet
&gt;
16591 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
16593 <p
>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:
</p
>
16595 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
16596 &lt;?xml version=
'1.0'?
&gt;
16597 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl=
"http://www.w3.org/
1999/XSL/Transform
" version=
'1.0'
16598 xmlns:fo=
"http://www.w3.org/
1999/XSL/Format
"&gt;
16599 &lt;xsl:template match=
"processing-instruction(
'linebreak)
"&gt;
16600 &lt;fo:block/
&gt;
16601 &lt;/xsl:template
&gt;
16602 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet
&gt;
16603 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
16605 <p
>One unsolved challenge is our wish to expose different ISBN numbers
16606 per publication format, while keeping all of them in some conditional
16607 structure in the DocBook source. No idea how to do this, so we ended
16608 up listing all the ISBN numbers next to their format in the colophon
16611 <p
>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
16612 <a href=
"https://github.com/sickel/kodemus
">source repository at
16614 (
<a href=
"https://github.com/EFN/kodemus
">future/new/official
16615 repository
</a
>). We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
16621 <title>Skolelinux
6 got a video review from Pcwizz
</title>
16622 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux_6_got_a_video_review_from_Pcwizz.html
</link>
16623 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux_6_got_a_video_review_from_Pcwizz.html
</guid>
16624 <pubDate>Sun,
17 Mar
2013 10:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
16625 <description><p
>Via
16626 <a href=
"https://twitter.com/pcwizz/status/
313044373262716930">twitter
</a
>
16627 I just discovered that
<a href=
"http://pcwizz.net/
">Pcwizz
</a
> have
16628 done a
<a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPzTZ61Pcuc
">video
16629 review
</a
> on Youtube of
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux
16630 / Debian Edu
</a
> version
6. He installed the standalone profile and
16631 the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of
16632 a few programs and his view of our distribution.
</p
>
16634 <p
>There is also some really nice quotes (transcribed by me, might
16635 have heard wrong). While looking thought the Graphics menu:
</p
>
16638 "Basically everything you ever need in a school environment.
"
16639 </blockquote
>
16641 <p
>And as a general evaluation of the entire distribution:
</p
>
16644 "So, yeah, a bit bloated. It kept all the Debian stuff in there, just
16645 to keep it nice and GNU. So, I do not want to go on about it, but
16646 lets give it
7 out of
10. I am not going to use it. That is because
16647 I am not deploying a school network. There may be some mythical
16648 feature to help you deploy Skolelinux on a school network.
"
16649 </blockquote
>
16651 <p
>To bad he did not test the server profile, and discovered the PXE
16652 installation option. It make it possible to install only the main
16653 server from CD, and the rest of the machines via the net, and might be
16654 considered the mythical feature he talk about. :)
</p
>
16656 <p
>While looking through the menus, there is also this funny comment
16657 about the part of the K menu generated from the Debian menu subsystem:
16660 "[The K menu] have a special Debian section for software that no-one
16661 is going to look at, because it contain lots of junky stuff that you
16662 actually don
't need in the education distribution, but have just been
16663 included because it isn
't stripped out for some reason.
"
16664 </blockquote
>
16666 <p
>I guess it is yet another argument for merging the Debian menu and
16667 Gnome/KDE desktop menu entries into
16668 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/DebianMenuUsingDesktopEntries
">one
16669 consistent menu system
</a
> instead of two incomplete and partly
16670 inconsistent menu systems.
</p
>
16672 <p
>The entire video is available below for those accepting iframe
16673 embedding:
</p
>
16675 <iframe width=
"560" height=
"315" src=
"http://www.youtube.com/embed/wPzTZ61Pcuc
" frameborder=
"0" allowfullscreen
></iframe
>
16680 <title>First Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze update released
</title>
16681 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html
</link>
16682 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html
</guid>
16683 <pubDate>Fri,
8 Mar
2013 09:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
16684 <description><p
>Last Sunday,
2013-
03-
03,, Holger Levsen announced the first update
16685 of
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux / Debian Edu
</a
>
16686 based on Debian Squeeze. This is the first update since
16687 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
03/msg00001.html
">the
16688 initial release
2012-
03-
11</a
>. This is the
16689 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2013/
03/msg00000.html
">release
16690 announcement email from Holger
</a
>:
</p
>
16692 <blockquote
><p
>Hi,
</p
>
16694 <p
>it
's my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Debian
16695 Edu
6.0.7+r1 (
"Debian Edu Squeeze
").
</p
>
16697 <p
>Debian Edu
6.0.7+r1 is an incremental update to Debian Edu
16698 6.0.4+r0, containing all the changes between Debian
6.0.4 and
6.0.7 as
16699 well Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements. See below (in this
16700 mail) for the full list of (edu) changes. Please see
16701 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2012/
20120311">http://www.debian.org/News/
2012/
20120311</a
>
16702 for more information on
"Debian Edu Squeeze
".
</p
>
16704 <p
>Images are available for download at
16705 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/
">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/
</a
></p
>
16708 <br
>1fe79eb4f0f9ae1c58fc318e26cc1e2e debian-edu-
6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
16709 <br
>a6ddd924a8bd9a1b5ca122e8fe1c34ec debian-edu-
6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
16710 <br
>ac6c72cd7925ccec51bfbf58e2a7c69c debian-edu-
6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso
</p
>
16713 <br
>a4b58233b672a99c7df8dc24fb6de3327654a5c3 debian-edu-
6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
16714 <br
>9b524915e0ff2aa793f13d93123e5bd2bab2dbaa debian-edu-
6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
16715 <br
>43997614893fc5e9e59ad6ce066b05d07fd836fa debian-edu-
6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso
</p
>
16717 <p
>These images are suitable for amd64+i386.
</p
>
16719 <p
>Changes for Debian Edu
6.0.7+r1 Codename
"Squeeze
", released
16720 2013-
03-
03:
</p
>
16723 <li
>sitesummary was updated from
0.1.3 to
0.1.8
16725 <li
>Make Nagios configuration more robust and efficient
</li
>
16726 <li
>Comply with
3.X kernel
</li
>
16727 </ul
></li
>
16728 <li
>debian-edu-doc from
1.4~
20120310~
6.0.4+r0 to
1.4~
20130228~
6.0.7+r1
16730 <li
>Minor updates from the wiki
</li
>
16731 <li
>Danish translation now complete
</li
>
16732 </ul
></li
>
16733 <li
>debian-edu-config from
1.453 to
1.455
16735 <li
>Fix /etc/hosts for LTSP diskless workstations. Closes: #
699880</li
>
16736 <li
>Make ltsp_local_mount script work for multiple devices.
</li
>
16737 <li
>Correct Kerberos user policy: don
't expire password after
2 days.
16738 Closes: #
664596</li
>
16739 <li
>Handle
'#
' characters in the root or first users password.
16740 Closes: #
664976</li
>
16741 <li
>Fixes for gosa-sync:
16743 <li
>Don
't fail if password contains
"</li
>
16744 <li
>Don
't disclose new password string in syslog
</li
>
16745 </ul
></li
>
16746 <li
>Fixes for gosa-create:
16748 <li
>Invalidate libnss cache before applying changes
</li
>
16749 <li
>Multiple failures during mass user import into GOsa²
</li
>
16750 <li
>gosa-netgroups plugin: don
't erase entries of attribute type
16751 "memberNisNetgroup
". Closes: #
687256</li
>
16752 <li
>First user now uses the same Kerberos policy as all other users
</li
>
16753 </ul
></li
>
16754 <li
>Add Danish web page
</li
>
16756 <li
>debian-edu-install from
1.528 to
1.530
16758 <li
>Improve preseeding support and documentation
</li
>
16759 </ul
></li
>
16762 <p
>End-user documentation in English is available at
16763 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/
">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/
</a
>
16764 - translations to French, Italian, Danish and German are available in
16765 the debian-edu-doc package. (Other languages could use your help!)
</p
>
16767 <p
>If you want to contribute to Debian Edu, please join our
16769 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/
">debian-edu@lists.debian.org
</a
>!
16770 </p
></blockquote
>
16772 <p
>I am very happy to see the fruits of a year of hard work. :)
</p
>
16777 <title>Frikanalen - Complete TV station organised using the web
</title>
16778 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen___Complete_TV_station_organised_using_the_web.html
</link>
16779 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen___Complete_TV_station_organised_using_the_web.html
</guid>
16780 <pubDate>Sun,
3 Mar
2013 07:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
16781 <description><p
>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
16782 broadcast them on the air? Using free software? With video on demand
16784 <a href=
"http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition
">free and
16785 open standards
</a
>? Included a web based video stream as well? And
16786 administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world? A
16787 few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
16788 <a href=
"http://www.frikanalen.no/
">Frikanalen
</a
> have been building a
16789 system to do just this. The source code for the solution is licensed
16790 using the GNU LGPL, and
16791 <a href=
"http://github.com/Frikanalen
">available from github
</a
>.
</p
>
16793 <p
>The idea is simple. You upload a video file over the web, and
16794 attach meta information to the file. You select a time slot in the
16795 program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
16796 in the web stream. It is also made available in a video on demand
16797 solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time. All
16798 you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.
</p
>
16800 <p
>There are several parts to this web based solution. I
'll mention
16801 the three most important ones. The first part is the database of
16802 videos and the schedule. This is written in Django and include a REST
16803 API. The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
16804 PostgreSQL. At the moment this system can be tested on
16805 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/
">beta.frikanalen.tv
</a
>. The
16806 second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
16807 the database and providing a video stream to broadcast. This is done
16808 using
<a href=
"http://www.casparcg.com/
">CasparCG from SVT
</a
> and
16809 <a href=
"http://www.mltframework.org/
">Media Lovin
' Toolkit
</a
>. Video
16810 signal distribution is handled using
16811 <a href=
"http://www.ob-encoder.com/
">Open Broadcast Encoder
</a
>. The
16812 third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
16813 video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
16814 on demand. It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
16815 decided what it will end up using. Note that the source of the latter
16816 two parts are not yet pushed to github. The lead author want to clean
16817 them up a bit more first.
</p
>
16819 <p
>The development is coordinated on the
16820 <a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/%
23frikanalen
">#frikanalen IRC
16821 channel
</a
> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
16822 <a href=
"http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen
">the
16823 frikanalen mailing list
</a
>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
16824 (phed on IRC). Anyone is welcome to participate in the
16825 development.
</p
>
16830 <title>Dr. Richard Stallman, founder of Free Software Foundation, give a talk in Oslo March
1st
2013</title>
16831 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dr__Richard_Stallman__founder_of_Free_Software_Foundation__give_a_talk_in_Oslo_March_1st_2013.html
</link>
16832 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dr__Richard_Stallman__founder_of_Free_Software_Foundation__give_a_talk_in_Oslo_March_1st_2013.html
</guid>
16833 <pubDate>Wed,
27 Feb
2013 20:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
16834 <description><p
>Dr.
<a href=
"http://www.stallman.org/
">Richard Stallman
</a
>,
16835 founder of
<a href=
"http://www.fsf.org/
">Free Software Foundation
</a
>,
16836 is giving
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20130301-rms/
">a
16837 talk in Oslo March
1st
2013 17:
00 to
19:
00</a
>. The event is public
16838 and organised by
<a href=
"">Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG)
</a
>
16839 (where I am the chair of the board) and
16840 <a href=
"http://www.friprog.no/
">The Norwegian Open Source Competence
16841 Center
</a
>. The title of the talk is «The Free Software Movement and
16842 GNU», with this description:
16844 <p
><blockquote
>
16845 The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users
' freedom to
16846 cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement
16847 developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the
16848 kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.
16849 </blockquote
></p
>
16851 <p
>The meeting is open for everyone. Due to space limitations, the
16852 doors opens for NUUG members at
16:
15, and everyone else at
16:
45. I
16853 am really curious how many will show up. See
16854 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20130301-rms/
">the event
16855 page
</a
> for the location details.
</p
>
16860 <title>Frikart - Free Garmin maps for European countries based on OpenStreetmap
</title>
16861 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikart___Free_Garmin_maps_for_European_countries_based_on_OpenStreetmap.html
</link>
16862 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikart___Free_Garmin_maps_for_European_countries_based_on_OpenStreetmap.html
</guid>
16863 <pubDate>Fri,
15 Feb
2013 09:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
16864 <description><p
>If you, like me, want an updated a map for your Garmin GPS, there is
16865 now a great source of free maps available from
16866 <a href=
"http://www.frikart.no/garmin/index.html
">Frikart
</a
>. To
16867 download a map, just click on the country you are interested in, and
16868 download the map type you want. There are
8 different maps available,
16869 using different colours and data selection. Pick one of Roadmap, Topo
16870 Summer, Topo Winter, Roadmap II, Topo Summer II, Topo Winter II,
16871 "Trails - overlay map
" and
"Cross country - overlay map
" (see the web
16872 page for descriptions).
</p
>
16874 <p
>The maps are updated weekly, so if you find something wrong in the
16875 map you can just edit the
16876 <a href=
"http://www.openstreetmap.org/
">OpenStreetmap
</a
> map source
16877 (anyone can contribute) and fetch a fixed map a week later. :)
</p
>
16882 <title>"Electronic
" paper invoices - using vCard in a QR code
</title>
16883 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html
</link>
16884 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html
</guid>
16885 <pubDate>Tue,
12 Feb
2013 10:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
16886 <description><p
>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
16887 <a href=
"http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura
">solution promoted
16888 by the Norwegian government
</a
> require that invoices are sent through
16889 one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
16890 electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
16891 facilitators. This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
16892 transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers. My preferred
16893 solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
16894 between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
16895 protocol like REST or SOAP. But this might also be overkill, as the
16896 "electronic
" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
16897 using a simple bar code. My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
16898 codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there. The
16899 content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
16900 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard
">the vCard format
</a
>, as
16901 it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.
</p
>
16903 <p
>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
16904 information can be included using such extentions. For example an
16905 invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
16906 <a href=
"http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html
">ask
16907 for donations to the Debian Edu project
</a
> and thus have bank account
16908 information publicly available) for NOK
1000.00 could have these extra
16911 <p
><pre
>
16913 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
16914 X-INVOICE-KID:
123412341234
16915 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
16916 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:
16040884339
16917 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
16918 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
16919 </pre
></p
>
16921 <p
>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
16923 <a href=
"http://stackoverflow.com/questions/
10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file
">how
16924 to put bank account information into a vCard
</a
>. For payments in
16925 Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
16926 used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.
</p
>
16928 <p
>The complete vCard could look like this:
</p
>
16930 <p
><pre
>
16933 ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
16934 ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei
29D;OSLO;;
0485;Norway
16935 URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
16936 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
16937 REV:
20130212T095000Z
16939 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
16940 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
16941 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:
16040884339
16942 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
16943 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
16945 </pre
></p
>
16947 <p
>The resulting QR code created using
16948 <a href=
"http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/
">qrencode
</a
> would look
16949 like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
16950 phone, or for example the
<a href=
"http://zbar.sourceforge.net/
">zbar
16951 bar code reader
</a
> and feed right into the approval and accounting
16954 <p
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
02-
12-qr-invoice.png
"></p
>
16956 <p
>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
16957 vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
16958 handling invoices. I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
16959 are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.
</p
>
16961 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
02-
12 11:
30</strong
>: Added KID to the proposal
16962 based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.
</p
>
16967 <title>Sleep until morning - home automation for the kids
</title>
16968 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sleep_until_morning___home_automation_for_the_kids.html
</link>
16969 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sleep_until_morning___home_automation_for_the_kids.html
</guid>
16970 <pubDate>Sun,
10 Feb
2013 12:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
16971 <description><p
><img align=
"left
" style=
"margin-right:
25px;
" src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
02-
10-morning-light.jpeg
"></p
>
16973 <p
>With kids in the house, one challenge is getting them to sleep
16974 during the night and wake up when it is morning. I mean, when I
16975 believe it is morning, and not two hours earlier. In our household we
16976 have decided that
07:
00 is the turning point, but getting the kids to
16977 sleep until
07:
00 is a small challenge every day. They have adapted
16978 quite well, and rarely wake up at
05:
00 any more, but some times wake
16979 up at times like
05:
50,
06:
15,
06:
30 or
06:
45, and it is hard to put
16980 the awake one to bed again without disturbing and waking the rest.
16981 And I understand perfectly well that they fail to sleep until
07:
00
16982 some times, as there is no way for them to know if it is before or
16983 after the magic moment without coming and asking us parents.
</p
>
16985 <p
>But yesterday I came up with a method to solve this problem. It
16986 involve home automation. A few years ago I bought a
16987 <a href=
"http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick
">Tellstick
</a
> and RF
16988 switches at the local
<a href=
"http://www.clasohlson.com/
">Clas
16989 Ohlson
</a
> shop, allowing me to control lights and other electrical
16990 gadgets using my Linux server. When I moved from the old flat to a
16991 small house, I put away all this equipment as most of the lighting in
16992 the house was not using wall sockets and thus not easy to connect to
16993 the gadgets I had. But recently I bought a
16994 <a href=
"http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick_net
">Tellstick
16995 Net
</a
> to be able to read sensor input as well as control power
16996 sockets. I want to control ovens in the basement to avoid the pipes
16997 to freeze, and monitor the humidity to detect flooding. The default
16998 setup for Tellstick Net is to be controlled by the vendor web service,
16999 which to me is a security problem, but it is also possible to build
17001 <a href=
"http://developer.telldus.com/blog/
2012/
03/
02/help-us-develop-local-access-using-tellstick-net-build-your-own-firmware
">firmware
17002 with local access
</A
> instead of being controlled by a Swedish
17003 company, thanks to the release of the GPL licensed firmware source
17004 code. I plan to get that running before I let it control anything
17005 important. But while working on this, one idea to make it easier for
17006 the kids came to me yesterday. We can set up a night light controlled
17007 by the computer, and turn it automatically on at
07:
00. The kids can
17008 then check the light in the morning to know if they are supposed to
17009 get up or not. They joined me in setting everything up, and I
17010 repeated the concept several times before bed times to make sure they
17011 remembered to check the light before getting up in the morning.
</p
>
17013 <p
>We tested it this morning, and all the kids stayed in bed until
17014 after
07:
00, and every one of them commented on the fact that the
17015 "morning light
" was turned on and signalled that the morning had
17016 arrived. So this look like a success, and I am excited to see how
17017 this develops the next few days. :) I really hope this can allow us
17018 all to sleep a bit longer in the morning.
</p
>
17020 <p
>A nice advantage of this setup is that we can remote control when
17021 to tell the kids to get up. We do not have to wait until
07:
00, and
17022 can also delay it if we want to.
</p
>
17027 <title>Bitcoin GUI now available from Debian/unstable (and Ubuntu/raring)
</title>
17028 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html
</link>
17029 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html
</guid>
17030 <pubDate>Sat,
2 Feb
2013 09:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
17031 <description><p
>My
17032 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html
">last
17033 bitcoin related blog post
</a
> mentioned that the new
17034 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin
">bitcoin package
</a
> for
17035 Debian was waiting in NEW. It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
17036 2013-
01-
19, and have been available in unstable since then. It was
17037 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
17038 version too.
</p
>
17040 <p
>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
17041 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
17042 architectures. For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
17043 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
17044 architectures (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
672524">BTS #
672524</a
>).
17045 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
17046 no-one have been able to propose a fix. If you got an idea what is
17047 failing, please let us know via the BTS.
</p
>
17049 <p
>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
17050 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
17051 if it run short on space (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
696715">BTS
17052 #
696715</a
>). So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
17055 <p
>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
17056 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
17057 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
17062 <title>Welcome to the world, Isenkram!
</title>
17063 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html
</link>
17064 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html
</guid>
17065 <pubDate>Tue,
22 Jan
2013 22:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
17066 <description><p
>Yesterday, I
17067 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
">asked
17068 for testers
</a
> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
17069 pluggable hardware devices, which I
17070 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
">set
17071 out to create
</a
> earlier this month. Several valuable testers showed
17072 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
17073 people. But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
17074 for this project. Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
17075 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name. In the
17076 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
17077 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git
">collab-maint
</a
>
17078 repository in Debian. The new name? It is
<strong
>Isenkram
</strong
>.
17079 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use
</p
>
17082 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
17083 cd isenkram
&& git-buildpackage -us -uc
17086 <p
>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet. If you
17087 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
17088 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
17089 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)
</p
>
17091 <p
>If you wonder what
'isenkram
' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
17092 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc. Typical hardware
17093 stuff, in other words. I
've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
17094 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
17097 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
01-
26</strong
>: Added -us -us to build
17098 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
17101 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
01-
27</strong
>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
17102 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.
</p
>
17107 <title>First prototype ready making hardware easier to use in Debian
</title>
17108 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
</link>
17109 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
</guid>
17110 <pubDate>Mon,
21 Jan
2013 12:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
17111 <description><p
>Early this month I set out to try to
17112 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
">improve
17113 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices
</a
>. Now my
17114 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience. To test
17116 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/
">source
17117 from the Debian Edu subversion repository
</a
>, build and install the
17118 package. You might have to log out and in again activate the
17119 autostart script.
</p
>
17121 <p
>The design is simple:
</p
>
17125 <li
>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
17126 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.
</li
>
17128 <li
>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
17129 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
17130 initially did.
</li
>
17132 <li
>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
17133 the APT database, a database
17134 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup
">available
17135 via HTTP
</a
> and a database available as part of the package.
</li
>
17137 <li
>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
17138 isn
't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
17139 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
17140 package or packages.
</li
>
17142 <li
>If the user click on the
'install package now
' button, ask
17143 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.
</li
>
17145 <li
>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
17146 package while showing progress information in a window.
</li
>
17150 <p
>I still need to come up with a better name for the system. Here
17151 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action. First the
17152 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
17153 approve all the dependencies. Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.
</p
>
17155 <p
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
21-hw-support-
1-notification.png
">
17156 <br
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
21-hw-support-
2-password.png
">
17157 <br
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
21-hw-support-
3-dependencies.png
">
17158 <br
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
21-hw-support-
4-installing.png
">
17159 <br
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
21-hw-support-
5-installing-details.png
" width=
"70%
"></p
>
17161 <p
>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
17162 is already useful. The database of hardware to package mappings also
17163 need more work. It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
17164 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
17165 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
17166 method. I
've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
17167 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
17168 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.
</p
>
17170 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
01-
21 16:
50</strong
>: Due to popular demand,
17171 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
17172 '<tt
>svn checkout
17173 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
17174 hw-support-handler; debuild
</tt
>'. If you lack debuild, install the
17175 devscripts package.
</p
>
17177 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
01-
23 12:
00</strong
>: The project is now
17178 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
17179 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository. See
17180 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html
">build
17181 instructions
</a
> for details.
</p
>
17186 <title>Thank you Thinkpad X41, for your long and trustworthy service
</title>
17187 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html
</link>
17188 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html
</guid>
17189 <pubDate>Sat,
19 Jan
2013 09:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
17190 <description><p
>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died. It died quietly and
17191 suddenly in bed. With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
17192 black. The power button was no longer able to turn it on. It was a
17193 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had. Better than both
17194 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S. Far better than the
17195 Compaq I had before that. Now I need to find a replacement. To keep
17196 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
17197 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
17198 not a durable solution.
17200 <p
>My laptop needs are fairly modest. This is my wishlist from when I
17201 got a new one more than
10 years ago. It still holds true.:)
</p
>
17205 <li
>Lightweight (around
1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
17206 than A4).
</li
>
17207 <li
>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.
</li
>
17208 <li
>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.
</li
>
17209 <li
>Long battery life time. Preferable a week.
</li
>
17210 <li
>Internal WIFI network card.
</li
>
17211 <li
>Internal Twisted Pair network card.
</li
>
17212 <li
>Some USB slots (
2-
3 is plenty)
</li
>
17213 <li
>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.
</li
>
17214 <li
>Video resolution at least
1024x768, with size around
12" (A4 paper
17216 <li
>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
17217 X.org packages.
</li
>
17218 <li
>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
17223 <p
>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
17224 list. The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
17225 last
10-
15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
17226 at other features to choose my laptop. But are there still made as
17227 robust laptops as my X41? The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
17228 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
17229 Lenovo took over. But I
've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
17230 still be useful.
</p
>
17232 <p
>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
17233 external keyboard? I
'll have to check the
17234 <a href=
"http://www.linux-laptop.net/
">Linux Laptops site
</a
> for
17235 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
17236 of the vendors listed on the
<a href=
"http://linuxpreloaded.com/
">Linux
17237 Pre-loaded site
</a
>.
</p
>
17242 <title>How to find a browser plugin supporting a given MIME type
</title>
17243 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html
</link>
17244 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html
</guid>
17245 <pubDate>Fri,
18 Jan
2013 10:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
17246 <description><p
>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
17247 install to get support for a given MIME type. Thanks to
17248 <a href=
"https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins
">specifications
17249 done by Ubuntu
</a
> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
17250 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
17251 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
17252 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:
</p
>
17258 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
17259 cache = apt.Cache()
17263 version = pkg.candidate
17264 if version is None:
17265 version = pkg.installed
17266 if version is None:
17268 record = version.record
17269 if not record.has_key(
'Npp-MimeType
'):
17271 mime_types = record[
'Npp-MimeType
'].split(
',
')
17272 for t in mime_types:
17273 t = t.rstrip().strip()
17275 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
17277 mimetype =
"audio/ogg
"
17278 if
1 < len(sys.argv):
17279 mimetype = sys.argv[
1]
17280 print
"Browser plugin packages supporting %s:
" % mimetype
17281 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
17282 print
" %s
" %pkg
17285 <p
>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:
</p
>
17288 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
17289 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
17291 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
17292 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
17293 browser-plugin-gnash
17297 <p
>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
17298 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
17299 packages. It would be great if Debian supported such feature too. Is
17300 anyone working on adding it?
</p
>
17302 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
01-
18 14:
20</strong
>: The Debian BTS
17303 request for icweasel support for this feature is
17304 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
484010">#
484010</a
> from
2008 (and
17305 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
698426">#
698426</a
> from today). Lack
17306 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
17307 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.
</p
>
17312 <title>What is the most supported MIME type in Debian?
</title>
17313 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html
</link>
17314 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html
</guid>
17315 <pubDate>Wed,
16 Jan
2013 10:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
17316 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal
">DEP-
11
17317 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive
</a
>, is a
17318 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
17319 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
17320 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing. With such
17321 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
17322 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
17323 downloaded by the browser.
</p
>
17325 <p
>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
17326 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
17327 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there. The result
17328 can be found on the
17329 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest
">Skolelinux FTP
17330 site
</a
>. Using the collected information, it become possible to
17331 answer the question in the title. Here are the
20 most supported MIME
17332 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
17333 The complete list is available from the link above.
</p
>
17335 <p
><strong
>Debian Stable:
</strong
></p
>
17339 ----- -----------------------
17353 18 audio/x-musepack
17355 18 application/x-ogg
17362 <p
><strong
>Debian Testing:
</strong
></p
>
17366 ----- -----------------------
17382 18 application/x-ogg
17385 17 audio/x-musepack
17389 <p
><strong
>Debian Unstable:
</strong
></p
>
17393 ----- -----------------------
17410 18 application/x-ogg
17411 17 audio/x-musepack
17416 <p
>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
17417 information mentioned in DEP-
11. I have not yet had time to look at
17418 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
17421 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
01-
16 13:
35</strong
>: Updated numbers after
17422 discovering a typo in my script.
</p
>
17427 <title>Using modalias info to find packages handling my hardware
</title>
17428 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html
</link>
17429 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html
</guid>
17430 <pubDate>Tue,
15 Jan
2013 08:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
17431 <description><p
>Yesterday, I wrote about the
17432 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html
">modalias
17433 values provided by the Linux kernel
</a
> following my hope for
17434 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
">better
17435 dongle support in Debian
</a
>. Using this knowledge, I have tested how
17436 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
17437 to hardware. This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
17438 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
17439 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
17440 packages.
</p
>
17442 <p
>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
17443 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
17444 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
17445 modalias.
</p
>
17447 <p
><blockquote
>
17448 Package: package-name
17449 <br
>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)
</p
>
17450 </blockquote
></p
>
17452 <p
>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
17453 for a given modalias value using this file.
</p
>
17455 <p
>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
17456 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class
0E01):
</p
>
17458 <p
><blockquote
>
17460 <br
>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)
</p
>
17461 </blockquote
></p
>
17463 <p
>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
17464 CardBus bridge (bus class
0607) PCI device is present:
</p
>
17466 <p
><blockquote
>
17467 Package: pcmciautils
17468 <br
>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
17469 </blockquote
></p
>
17471 <p
>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
17472 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs
04D8:F8DA:
</p
>
17474 <p
><blockquote
>
17475 Package: colorhug-client
17476 <br
>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)
</p
>
17477 </blockquote
></p
>
17479 <p
>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
17480 file in the Debian archive. Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
17481 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.
</p
>
17483 <p
>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
17484 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
17485 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
17486 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
17487 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information. I
've
17488 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
17489 is working as it should with my prototype. It even made it to Ubuntu
17492 <p
>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
17493 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
17494 implementation of the lookup code. The idea is to create files for
17495 each modalias and let the shell do the matching. Please check out and
17497 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co
">hw-support-lookup
</a
>
17498 shell script. It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
17499 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
17500 repository where I currently work on my prototype.
</p
>
17502 <p
>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
17503 install yubikey-personalization:
</p
>
17505 <p
><blockquote
>
17506 % ./hw-support-lookup
17507 <br
>yubikey-personalization
17509 </blockquote
></p
>
17511 <p
>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
17512 propose to install the pcmciautils package:
</p
>
17514 <p
><blockquote
>
17515 % ./hw-support-lookup
17516 <br
>pcmciautils
17518 </blockquote
></p
>
17520 <p
>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
17521 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co
">my
17522 database
</a
>, please tell me about it.
</p
>
17524 <p
>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
17525 packages and hardware. One source would be to look at packages with
17526 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
17527 extract their modalias information. Another would be to look at
17528 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
17529 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
17530 generate a modalias matching rule. I have not tested any of these to
17531 see if it work.
</p
>
17533 <p
>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
17534 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
17535 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
17536 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-devel
">#debian-devel
</a
>.
</p
>
17541 <title>Modalias strings - a practical way to map
"stuff
" to hardware
</title>
17542 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html
</link>
17543 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html
</guid>
17544 <pubDate>Mon,
14 Jan
2013 11:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
17545 <description><p
>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
17546 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
17547 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
17548 to document the details. Here are my findings so far, also available
17550 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/
">the
17551 Debian Edu subversion repository
</a
>:
17553 <p
><strong
>Modalias decoded
</strong
></p
>
17555 <p
>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
17556 values stands for. It is in part based on information from
17557 &lt;URL:
<a href=
"https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias
">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias
</a
> &gt;,
17558 &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;,
17559 &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
17560 &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;.
17562 <p
>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
17563 this shell script:
</p
>
17566 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -
0 cat | sort -u
17569 <p
>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
17570 using modinfo:
</p
>
17573 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
17574 alias: serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
17575 alias: serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
17579 <p
><strong
>PCI subtype
</strong
></p
>
17581 <p
>A typical PCI entry can look like this. This is an Intel Host
17582 Bridge memory controller:
</p
>
17584 <p
><blockquote
>
17585 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
17586 </blockquote
></p
>
17588 <p
>This represent these values:
</p
>
17591 v
00008086 (vendor)
17592 d
00002770 (device)
17593 sv
00001028 (subvendor)
17594 sd
000001AD (subdevice)
17596 sc
00 (bus subclass)
17600 <p
>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from
'lspci
17601 -n
' as
8086:
2770. The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
17602 0600. The
0600 class is a host bridge. Other useful bus values are
17603 0300 (VGA compatible card) and
0200 (Ethernet controller).
</p
>
17605 <p
>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
17608 <p
><strong
>USB subtype
</strong
></p
>
17610 <p
>Some typical USB entries can look like this. This is an internal
17611 USB hub in a laptop:
</p
>
17613 <p
><blockquote
>
17614 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
17615 </blockquote
></p
>
17617 <p
>Here is the values included in this alias:
</p
>
17620 v
1D6B (device vendor)
17621 p
0001 (device product)
17623 dc
09 (device class)
17624 dsc
00 (device subclass)
17625 dp
00 (device protocol)
17626 ic
09 (interface class)
17627 isc
00 (interface subclass)
17628 ip
00 (interface protocol)
17631 <p
>The
0900 device class/subclass means hub. Some times the relevant
17632 class is in the interface class section. For a simple USB web camera,
17633 these alias entries show up:
</p
>
17635 <p
><blockquote
>
17636 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
17637 <br
>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
17638 <br
>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
17639 <br
>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
17640 </blockquote
></p
>
17642 <p
>Interface class
0E01 is video control,
0E02 is video streaming (aka
17643 camera),
0101 is audio control device and
0102 is audio streaming (aka
17644 microphone). Thus this is a camera with microphone included.
</p
>
17646 <p
><strong
>ACPI subtype
</strong
></p
>
17648 <p
>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff. This is an IR
17649 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:
</p
>
17651 <p
><blockquote
>
17652 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
17653 </blockquote
></p
>
17655 <p
>The values between the colons are IDs.
</p
>
17657 <p
><strong
>DMI subtype
</strong
></p
>
17659 <p
>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
17660 and model. This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
17661 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:
</p
>
17663 <p
><blockquote
>
17664 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(
1.66):bd06/
15/
2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
17665 </blockquote
></p
>
17667 <p
>The values present are
</p
>
17670 bvn IBM (BIOS vendor)
17671 bvr
1UETB
6WW(
1.66) (BIOS version)
17672 bd
06/
15/
2005 (BIOS date)
17673 svn IBM (system vendor)
17674 pn
2371H4G (product name)
17675 pvr ThinkPadX40 (product version)
17676 rvn IBM (board vendor)
17677 rn
2371H4G (board name)
17678 rvr NotAvailable (board version)
17679 cvn IBM (chassis vendor)
17680 ct
10 (chassis type)
17681 cvr NotAvailable (chassis version)
17684 <p
>The chassis type
10 is Notebook. Other interesting values can be
17685 found in the dmidecode source:
</p
>
17689 4 Low Profile Desktop
17702 17 Main Server Chassis
17703 18 Expansion Chassis
17705 20 Bus Expansion Chassis
17706 21 Peripheral Chassis
17708 23 Rack Mount Chassis
17717 <p
>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
17718 table. For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
17719 claim it is a desktop.
</p
>
17721 <p
><strong
>SerIO subtype
</strong
></p
>
17723 <p
>This type is used for PS/
2 mouse plugs. One example is from my
17724 test machine:
</p
>
17726 <p
><blockquote
>
17727 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
17728 </blockquote
></p
>
17730 <p
>The values present are
</p
>
17739 <p
>This type is supported by the psmouse driver. I am not sure what
17740 the valid values are.
</p
>
17742 <p
><strong
>Other subtypes
</strong
></p
>
17744 <p
>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
17745 file2alias.c. There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
17746 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
17747 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
17748 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro. I did not spend time documenting all of
17749 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
17750 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.
</p
>
17752 <p
><strong
>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values
</strong
></p
>
17754 <p
>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
17755 one can use the following shell script:
</p
>
17758 for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -
0 cat | sort -u); do \
17759 echo
"$id
" ; \
17760 /sbin/modprobe --show-depends
"$id
"|sed
's/^/ /
' ; \
17764 <p
>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
17765 list is very long on my test machine):
</p
>
17769 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
17771 FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
17773 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
17774 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
17775 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
17776 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
17777 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
17778 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
17779 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
17780 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
17784 <p
>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
17785 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
17786 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
17787 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-devel
">#debian-devel
</a
>.
</p
>
17789 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
01-
15:
</strong
> Rewrite
"cat $(find ...)
" to
17790 "find ... -print0 | xargs -
0 cat
" to make sure it handle directories
17791 in /sys/ with space in them.
</p
>
17796 <title>Moved the pymissile Debian packaging to collab-maint
</title>
17797 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html
</link>
17798 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html
</guid>
17799 <pubDate>Thu,
10 Jan
2013 20:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
17800 <description><p
>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
17801 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
17802 Launcher and updated the Debian package
17803 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile
">pymissile
</a
> to make
17804 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in. I
17805 also added a
"Modaliases
" header to test it in the Debian archive and
17806 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
17807 plug in his rocket launcher. In the process I moved the source to a
17808 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
17809 contribute.
<a href=
"http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/
">Upstream
</a
>
17810 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
17811 years of relative silence. The new git repository is not listed in
17812 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
17813 bit more before I upload the new version. If you want to check out
17814 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
17815 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git
">gitweb
17816 view
</a
> or use
"<tt
>git clone
17817 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git
</tt
>".
</p
>
17822 <title>Lets make hardware dongles easier to use in Debian
</title>
17823 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
</link>
17824 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
</guid>
17825 <pubDate>Wed,
9 Jan
2013 15:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
17826 <description><p
>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
17827 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
17828 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
17829 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
17830 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
17831 machine. Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
17832 Linux distribution. When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
17833 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
17834 I need to talk to it. When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
17835 yubikey-personalization package. The information required to do this
17836 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.
</p
>
17838 <p
>Some years ago, I proposed to
17839 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/
2010/
05/msg01206.html
">use
17840 the discover subsystem to implement this
</a
>. The idea is fairly
17845 <li
>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
17846 starting when a user log in.
</li
>
17848 <li
>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
17849 hardware is inserted into the computer.
</li
>
17851 <li
>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
17852 database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
17853 packages.
</li
>
17855 <li
>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
17856 package, and make it easy to install it.
</li
>
17860 <p
>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
17861 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
17862 discover database to find packages and
17863 <a href=
"http://www.packagekit.org/
">PackageKit
</a
> to install
17864 packages.
</p
>
17866 <p
>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
17867 draft package is now checked into
17868 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/
">the
17869 Debian Edu subversion repository
</a
>. In the process, I updated the
17870 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html
">discover-data
</a
>
17871 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
17872 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
17873 2.2013.01.09 to unstable. I also discovered that the current
17874 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html
">discover
</a
>
17875 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
17876 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present. I ported it to use
17877 libusb as a fall back option to get it working. The fixed package
17878 version
2.1.2-
6 is now in experimental (didn
't upload it to unstable
17879 because of the freeze).
</p
>
17881 <p
>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
17882 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
17883 inserted):
</p
>
17885 <p align=
"center
"><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
09-hw-autoinstall.png
"></p
>
17887 <p
>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
17888 install the proposed packages by pressing the
"Please install
17889 program(s)
" button should to be implemented.
</p
>
17891 <p
>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
17892 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
17893 from hardware to Debian packages. Check if
'discover-pkginstall -l
'
17894 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
17895 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
17896 reportbug if it isn
't. Or, if you know of a better way to provide
17897 such mapping, please let me know.
</p
>
17899 <p
>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
17900 should be considered before it is ready for production use. Is dbus
17901 the correct way to detect new hardware? At the moment I look for HAL
17902 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
17903 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop. Are there better events to use?
17904 How should the user be notified? Is the desktop notification
17905 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
17906 popup instead? How should packages be installed? When should they
17907 not be installed?
</p
>
17909 <p
>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
17910 please send me an email. :)
</p
>
17915 <title>New IRC channel for LEGO designers using Debian
</title>
17916 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html
</link>
17917 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html
</guid>
17918 <pubDate>Wed,
2 Jan
2013 15:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
17919 <description><p
>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
17920 <a href=
"http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx
">LEGO Mindstorm
17921 NXT
</a
>. My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
17922 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
17923 already in Debian Squeeze. If Debian support for LEGO is something
17924 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
17925 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-lego
">#debian-lego
</a
> (server
17926 irc.debian.org). There is a lot that could be done to improve the
17927 Debian support for LEGO designers. For example both CAD software
17928 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)
</p
>
17930 <p
>Update
2012-
01-
03: A
17931 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners
">project page
</a
>
17932 including links to Lego related packages is now available.
</p
>
17937 <title>A Christmas present for Skolelinux / Debian Edu
</title>
17938 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html
</link>
17939 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html
</guid>
17940 <pubDate>Fri,
28 Dec
2012 09:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
17941 <description><p
>I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
17942 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux / Debian Edu
</a
>
17943 project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
17944 Agency in Trondheim. NOK
1000,- showed up on our donation account
17945 December
24th. I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
17946 present. As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
17947 funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
17948 gatherings, this donation was most welcome. One developer gathering
17949 cost around NOK
15&nbsp;
000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
17950 development pace we want. Thus, I hope their example this year is
17951 followed by many others. :)
</p
>
17953 <p
>The public list of donors can be found on
17954 <a href=
"http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html
">the
17955 donation page
</a
> for the project, which also contain instructions if
17956 you want to donate to the project.
</p
>
17961 <title>How to backport bitcoin-qt version
0.7.2-
2 to Debian Squeeze
</title>
17962 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html
</link>
17963 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html
</guid>
17964 <pubDate>Tue,
25 Dec
2012 20:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
17965 <description><p
>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
17966 year! I hope next year will prove to be a good year.
</p
>
17968 <p
><a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/
">Bitcoin
</a
>, the digital
17969 decentralised
"currency
" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
17970 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
17971 experiment. And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
17972 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/
">Debian
</a
> is about to improve a bit.
17973 The
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin
">new debian source
17974 package
</a
> (version
0.7.2-
2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
17975 in
<a href=
"http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html
">the NEW queue
</A
>
17976 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
17979 <p
>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
17980 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
17981 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:
</p
>
17983 <blockquote
><pre
>
17984 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
17986 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=
1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
17987 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
17988 </pre
></blockquote
>
17990 <p
>You might have to install some build dependencies as well. The
17991 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
17992 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment. Note that the
17993 client will download the complete set of bitcoin
"blocks
", which need
17994 around
5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment. Make sure your
17995 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
17996 all the blocks. The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
17997 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
17998 not be able to get all the features out of the client.
</p
>
18000 <p
>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
18001 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
18002 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
18007 <title>A word on bitcoin support in Debian
</title>
18008 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html
</link>
18009 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html
</guid>
18010 <pubDate>Fri,
21 Dec
2012 23:
59:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18011 <description><p
>It has been a while since I wrote about
18012 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/
">bitcoin
</a
>, the decentralised
18013 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
18014 have been busy elsewhere. But two days ago, I started looking at the
18015 state of
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin
">bitcoin in
18016 Debian
</a
> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet. The package
18017 is now maintained by a
18018 <a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/
">team of
18019 people
</a
>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team. We
18020 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
18021 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
18022 Wheezy. It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
18023 backports). The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
18024 it from entering testing. To try to help the team and improve the
18025 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
18026 reports. I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
18028 <a href=
"https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin
">PPA for
18029 Ubuntu
</a
>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
18030 Debian package.
</p
>
18032 <p
>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
18033 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
18034 improve the package. It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
18035 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
18036 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
18037 setup. As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
18038 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-
20121217/
000041.html
">a
18039 patch to backport
</a
> the latest version. Jonas is going to look at
18040 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
18041 new version to unstable.
18043 <p
>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
18044 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system. I
18045 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
18046 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
18047 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
18048 transactions to Wikileaks. But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
18049 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
18050 they sell products and services. Improving the bitcoin support in
18051 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
18052 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
18053 pay with bitcoin is still not very good. The bitcoin: URI is a step
18054 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
18055 use. Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
18056 quick transaction. I believe there are other clients available, but
18057 have not tested them.
</p
>
18060 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html
">experiment
18061 with bitcoins
</a
> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
18062 I received
20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
18063 years ago, as can be
18064 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">seen
18065 on the blockexplorer service
</a
>. Thank you everyone for your
18066 donation. The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
18067 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
18068 number of users have gone up since then. If you use bitcoin and want
18069 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
18070 the same address as last time,
18071 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
18076 <title>Ledger - double-entry accounting using text based storage format
</title>
18077 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ledger___double_entry_accounting_using_text_based_storage_format.html
</link>
18078 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ledger___double_entry_accounting_using_text_based_storage_format.html
</guid>
18079 <pubDate>Tue,
18 Dec
2012 23:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18080 <description><p
>A few days ago I came across
18081 <a href=
"http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/
">a blog post from Joey
18082 Hess
</a
> describing
<a href=
"http://ledger-cli.org/
">ledger
</a
> and
18083 hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting. I found it
18084 interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
18085 accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
18086 the different web based systems we use. I find it hard to find what I
18087 look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
18088 the systems. Ledger seem different. The accounting data is kept in
18089 text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
18091 are at least
<a href=
"https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports
">five
18092 different implementations
</a
> able to read the format. An example
18093 entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
18094 generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:
</p
>
18096 <blockquote
><pre
>
18097 2004-
05-
27 Book Store
18098 Expenses:Books $
20.00
18100 </pre
></blockquote
>
18102 <p
>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
18103 look for others using it. I found blog posts from
18104 <a href=
"http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/
">Christine
18106 <a href=
"http://bugsplat.info/
2010-
05-
23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html
">Pete
18108 <a href=
"http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/
2010/
11/
06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/
">Andrew
18109 Cantino
</a
> and
18110 <a href=
"http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/
2012/
11/
29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/
">Ronald
18111 Ip
</a
> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
18112 <a href=
"https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo
">Bradley
18113 M. Kuhn
</a
> at the Software Freedom Conservancy. All seemed like good
18114 recommendations fitting my need.
</p
>
18116 <p
>The
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html
">ledger
</a
>
18117 package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
18118 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html
">hledger
</a
>
18119 package only is available in Debian Sid. As I use Squeeze, ledger
18120 seemed the best choice to get started.
</p
>
18122 <p
>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
18123 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger
">web scraper
</a
> for
18124 <a href=
"http://www.lodo.no/
">LODO
</a
>, the accounting system used by
18125 the
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">NUUG
</a
> association, and started to
18126 play with the data set. I
'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
18127 am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
18128 using the
"<tt
>ledger balance
</tt
>" command. But I will have to
18129 gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
18130 for the organisations I am involved in.
</p
>
18135 <title>Scripting the Cerebrum/bofhd user administration system using XML-RPC
</title>
18136 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Scripting_the_Cerebrum_bofhd_user_administration_system_using_XML_RPC.html
</link>
18137 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Scripting_the_Cerebrum_bofhd_user_administration_system_using_XML_RPC.html
</guid>
18138 <pubDate>Thu,
6 Dec
2012 10:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18139 <description><p
>Where I work at the
<a href=
"http://www.uio.no/
">University of
18140 Oslo
</a
>, we use the
18141 <a href=
"http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/
">Cerebrum user
18142 administration system
</a
> to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
18143 I
've known since the system was written that the server is providing
18144 an
<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC
">XML-RPC
</a
> API, but
18145 I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
18146 always use the bofh command line client at work. Until today. I want
18147 to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
18148 virtual machines. Here are a few notes on how to use it with
18151 <p
>I started by looking at the source of the Java
18152 <a href=
"http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/
">bofh
18153 client
</a
>, to figure out how it connected to the API server. I also
18154 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
18155 <a href=
"http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html
">a
18156 simple example in
</a
> the XML-RPC howto.
</p
>
18158 <p
>This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
18159 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
18160 user currently logged in:
</p
>
18162 <blockquote
><pre
>
18163 #!/usr/bin/env python
18166 server_url =
'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:
8000';
18167 username = getpass.getuser()
18168 password = getpass.getpass()
18169 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
18170 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
18171 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
18172 print server.run_command(sessionid,
"user_info
", username)
18173 result = server.logout(sessionid)
18175 </pre
></blockquote
>
18177 <p
>Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
18178 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.
</p
>
18183 <title>Why isn
't the value of copyright taxed?
</title>
18184 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_the_value_of_copyright_taxed_.html
</link>
18185 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_the_value_of_copyright_taxed_.html
</guid>
18186 <pubDate>Sat,
17 Nov
2012 11:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18187 <description><p
>While working on a
18188 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">Norwegian
18189 translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig
</a
> (
76% done),
18190 which cover the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles
18191 creativity, one idea occurred to me. The idea is to get the tax
18192 office to help make more works enter the public domain and also help
18193 make it easier to clear rights for using copyrighted works.
</p
>
18195 <p
>I mentioned this idea briefly during Yesterdays
18196 <a href=
"http://www.farmann.no/
2012/
11/
14/john-perry-barlow-in-oslo-friday-nov-
16
18197 -
15-
30-
19-
00/
">presentation
18198 by John Perry Barlow
</a
>, and concluded that it was best to put it
18199 in writing for a wider audience. The idea is not really based on the
18200 argument that copyrighted works are
"intellectual property
", as the
18201 core requirement is that copyrighted work have value for the copyright
18202 holder and the tax office like to collect their share from any value
18203 controlled by the citizens in a country. I
'm sharing the idea here to
18204 let others consider it and perhaps shoot it down with a fresh set of
18205 arguments.
</p
>
18207 <p
>Most valuables are taxed by the government. At least here in
18208 Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
18209 the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
18210 stocks and other valuables are all added together. If the tax value
18211 of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
18212 taxes for these values. And copyrighted work have value. It have
18213 value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
18214 work. But it is not included in the tax calculations? Why not?
</p
>
18216 <p
>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it would want to
18217 maintain a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the
18218 rights holders for a given works, to be able to associate the works
18219 value to the right citizen or company for tax purposes. If such
18220 database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to
18221 for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very
18222 hard operation with todays copyright law. To ensure that copyright
18223 holders keep the database up-to-date, it would have to become a
18224 requirement to be able to collect money for granting access to
18225 copyrighted works that the work is listed in the database with the
18226 correct right holder.
</p
>
18228 <p
>If copyright causes copyright holders to have to pay more taxes,
18229 they will have a small incentive to
"disown
" their copyright, and let
18230 the work enter the public domain. For works with several right holders
18231 one of the right holders could state (and get it registered in the
18232 database) that she do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to
18233 use the work in question and thus will not get any income from that
18234 work. Stating this would have to be impossible to revert and stop the
18235 tax office from adding the value of that work to the given citizens
18236 tax calculation. I assume the copyright law would stay the same,
18237 allowing creators to pick a license of their choosing, and also
18238 allowing them to put their work directly in the public domain. The
18239 existence of such database will make it even easier to clear rights,
18240 and if the right holders listed in the database is taxed, this system
18241 would increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.
</p
>
18243 <p
>The effect would be that the tax office help to make it easier to
18244 get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public
18245 domain and help to get more work into the public domain.
</p
>
18247 <p
>Why have such taxing not happened yet? I am sure the tax office
18248 would like to tax copyrighted work values if they could.
</p
>
18253 <title>Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß
</title>
18254 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html
</link>
18255 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html
</guid>
18256 <pubDate>Wed,
14 Nov
2012 21:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18257 <description><p
>Here is another interview with one of the people in the
<a
18258 href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>
18259 community. I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
18260 if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
18261 After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
18262 the people behind the German
18263 "<a href=
"http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/
">IT-Zukunft Schule
</a
>"
18264 project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview. Give a warm
18265 welcome to Angela Fuß. :)
</p
>
18267 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
18269 <p
>I am a
39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
18270 Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with
"my man
" Mike Gabriel, my
18271 two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
18273 <p
>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
18274 the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
18275 Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
18276 growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
18277 system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-). We are also
18278 in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.
</p
>
18280 <p
>In
2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
18281 nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there. Besides
18282 that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
18283 working in our own school project
"IT-Zukunft Schule
" in North
18284 Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
18285 relationship management and the communication processes in the
18288 <p
>Since
2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
18289 and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
18290 and a yoga teacher.
</p
>
18292 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
18293 project?
</strong
></p
>
18295 <p
>I fell in love with Mike ;-).
</p
>
18297 <p
>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
18298 Free Software. At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
18299 founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
18300 their IT environment. Often when Mike came home from working at the
18301 newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
18302 several points where the communication with the schools head or the
18303 teachers did not work. So we were clear that he would not work for
18304 one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
18305 between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
18308 <p
>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
18309 started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
18310 schools. One day before Christmas
2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
18311 Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
18312 networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
18313 Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
18316 <p
>For information about our school project you can read
18317 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html
">the
18318 interview with Mike Gabriel
</a
>.
</p
>
18320 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
18321 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
18323 <p
>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
18324 answer comes rather from a social point of view.
</p
>
18326 <p
>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
18327 and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
18328 background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
18329 and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
18330 something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
18331 ;-). This is of course a user experience. What I also get as a big
18332 advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
18333 works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
18334 teachers, parents...
</p
>
18336 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
18337 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
18339 <p
>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
18340 Skolelinux / Debian Edu.
</p
>
18342 <p
>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
18343 the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
18344 marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
18345 schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
18346 I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.
</p
>
18348 <p
>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
18349 do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
18350 democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
18351 and helpful. I am also missing some kind of contact between the
18352 Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
18353 level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
18354 different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.
</p
>
18356 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
18358 <p
>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu
10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
18359 on. As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
18360 LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
18361 my N900 running with Maemo.
</p
>
18363 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
18364 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
18366 <p
>I am really convinced that in our school project
"IT-Zukunft
18367 Schule
" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
18368 schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
18369 that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
18370 strategy has three crucial pillars:
</p
>
18374 <li
>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
18375 concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
18376 kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.
</li
>
18378 <li
>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
18379 are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
18380 beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
18381 they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
18382 they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
18383 needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
18384 we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.
</li
>
18386 <li
>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
18387 co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
18388 contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
18389 offer to become more and more independent from us.
</li
>
18396 <title>The European Central Bank (ECB) take a look at bitcoin
</title>
18397 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_European_Central_Bank__ECB__take_a_look_at_bitcoin.html
</link>
18398 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_European_Central_Bank__ECB__take_a_look_at_bitcoin.html
</guid>
18399 <pubDate>Sun,
4 Nov
2012 08:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18400 <description><p
>Slashdot just ran a story about the European Central Bank (ECB)
18401 <a href=
"http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf
">releasing
18402 a report (PDF)
</a
> about virtual currencies and
18403 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/
">bitcoin
</a
>. It is interesting to
18404 see how a member of the bitcoin community
18405 <a href=
"http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/
2012/
10/
30/the-ecb-report-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currencies.html
">receive
18406 the report
</a
>. As for the future, I suspect the central banks and
18407 the governments will outlaw bitcoin if it gain any popularity, to avoid
18408 competition. My thoughts go to the
18409 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wörgl
">Wörgl experiment
</a
> with
18410 negative inflation on cash which was such a success that it was
18411 terminated by the Austrian National Bank in
1933. A successful
18412 alternative would be a threat to the current money system and gain
18413 powerful forces to work against it.
</p
>
18415 <p
>While checking out the current status of bitcoin, I also discovered
18416 that the community already seem to have
18417 <a href=
"http://www.theverge.com/
2012/
8/
27/
3271637/bitcoin-savings-trust-pyramid-scheme-shuts-down
">experienced
18418 its first pyramid game / Ponzi scheme
</a
>. Not very surprising, given
18419 how members of
"small
" communities tend to trust each other. I guess
18420 enterprising crocks will try again and again, as they do anywhere
18421 wealth is available.
</p
>
18426 <title>12 years of outages - summarised by Stuart Kendrick
</title>
18427 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/
12_years_of_outages___summarised_by_Stuart_Kendrick.html
</link>
18428 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/
12_years_of_outages___summarised_by_Stuart_Kendrick.html
</guid>
18429 <pubDate>Fri,
26 Oct
2012 14:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
18430 <description><p
>I work at the
<a href=
"http://www.uio.no/
">University of Oslo
</a
>
18431 looking after the computers, mostly on the unix side, but in general
18432 all over the place. I am also a member (and currently leader) of
18433 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">the NUUG association
</a
>, which in turn
18434 make me a member of
<a href=
"http://www.usenix.org/
">USENIX
</a
>. NUUG
18435 is an member organisation for us in Norway interested in free
18436 software, open standards and unix like operating systems, and USENIX
18437 is a US based member organisation with similar targets. And thanks to
18438 these memberships, I get all issues of the great USENIX magazine
18439 <a href=
"https://www.usenix.org/publications/login
">;login:
</a
> in the
18440 mail several times a year. The magazine is great, and I read most of
18441 it every time.
</p
>
18443 <p
>In the last issue of the USENIX magazine ;login:, there is an
18444 article by
<a href=
"http://www.skendric.com/
">Stuart Kendrick
</a
> from
18445 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center titled
18446 "<a href=
"https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/october-
2012-volume-
37-number-
5/what-takes-us-down
">What
18447 Takes Us Down
</a
>" (longer version also
18448 <a href=
"http://www.skendric.com/problem/incident-analysis/
2012-
06-
30/What-Takes-Us-Down.pdf
">available
18449 from his own site
</a
>), where he report what he found when he
18450 processed the outage reports (both planned and unplanned) from the
18451 last twelve years and classified them according to cause, time of day,
18452 etc etc. The article is a good read to get some empirical data on
18453 what kind of problems affect a data centre, but what really inspired
18454 me was the kind of reporting they had put in place since
2000.
<p
>
18456 <p
>The centre set up a mailing list, and started to send fairly
18457 standardised messages to this list when a outage was planned or when
18458 it already occurred, to announce the plan and get feedback on the
18459 assumtions on scope and user impact. Here is the two example from the
18460 article: First the unplanned outage:
18462 <blockquote
><pre
>
18463 Subject: Exchange
2003 Cluster Issues
18464 Severity: Critical (Unplanned)
18465 Start: Monday, May
7,
2012,
11:
58
18466 End: Monday, May
7,
2012,
12:
38
18467 Duration:
40 minutes
18468 Scope: Exchange
2003
18469 Description: The HTTPS service on the Exchange cluster crashed, triggering
18470 a cluster failover.
18472 User Impact: During this period, all Exchange users were unable to
18473 access e-mail. Zimbra users were unaffected.
18475 </pre
></blockquote
>
18477 Next the planned outage:
18479 <blockquote
><pre
>
18480 Subject: H Building Switch Upgrades
18481 Severity: Major (Planned)
18482 Start: Saturday, June
16,
2012,
06:
00
18483 End: Saturday, June
16,
2012,
16:
00
18485 Scope: H2 Transport
18486 Description: Currently, Catalyst
4006s provide
10/
100 Ethernet to end-
18487 stations. We will replace these with newer Catalyst
18489 User Impact: All users on H2 will be isolated from the network during
18490 this work. Afterward, they will have gigabit
18493 </pre
></blockquote
>
18495 <p
>He notes in his article that the date formats and other fields have
18496 been a bit too free form to make it easy to automatically process them
18497 into a database for further analysis, and I would have used ISO
8601
18498 dates myself to make it easier to process (in other words I would ask
18499 people to write
'2012-
06-
16 06:
00 +
0000' instead of the start time
18500 format listed above). There are also other issues with the format
18501 that could be improved, read the article for the details.
</p
>
18503 <p
>I find the idea of standardising outage messages seem to be such a
18504 good idea that I would like to get it implemented here at the
18505 university too. We do register
18506 <a href=
"http://www.uio.no/tjenester/it/aktuelt/planlagte-tjenesteavbrudd/
">planned
18507 changes and outages in a calendar
</a
>, and report the to a mailing
18508 list, but we do not do so in a structured format and there is not a
18509 report to the same location for unplanned outages. Perhaps something
18510 for other sites to consider too?
</p
>
18515 <title>Amazon steal books from customer and throw out her out without any explanation
</title>
18516 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Amazon_steal_books_from_customer_and_throw_out_her_out_without_any_explanation.html
</link>
18517 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Amazon_steal_books_from_customer_and_throw_out_her_out_without_any_explanation.html
</guid>
18518 <pubDate>Mon,
22 Oct
2012 20:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
18519 <description><p
>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
18520 <a href=
"http://www.bekkelund.net/
2012/
10/
22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/
">how
18521 Amazon erased the books from a customer
's kindle, locked the account
18522 and refuse to tell the customer why
</a
>. If a real book store did
18523 this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property
18524 and theft. The story has spread around the net today. A bit more
18525 background information is available in Norwegian from
18526 <a href=
"http://www.digi.no/
904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon
">digi.no
</a
>.
18527 It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used
18528 this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was
18529 introduced many years back. And Amazon proved in
2009 that it was
18531 <a href=
"http://boingboing.net/
2009/
07/
20/amazons-orwellian-de.html
">
18532 break into customers equipment and remove the books
</a
> people had
18533 bought, when it removed the book
1984 by George Orwell from all the
18534 customers who had bought it. From the official comments, it even
18536 <a href=
"http://www.nytimes.com/
2009/
07/
18/technology/companies/
18amazon.html
">Amazon
18537 would never do that again
</a
>. And here we are, three years
18540 <p
>And thought this action is
18541 <a href=
"http://www.itavisen.no/
904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende
">against
18542 Norwegian regulations and law
</a
>, it is according to the terms of use
18543 as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to
18544 Norwegian laws. It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms
18545 of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer
18548 <p
>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
18549 unacceptable terms. For example
18550 <a href=
"http://www.gutenberg.org/
">Project Gutenberg
</a
> (about
40,
000
18551 books),
<a href=
"http://runeberg.org/
">Project Runenberg
</a
> (
1,
652
18552 books) and
<a href=
"http://www.archive.org/details/texts
">The Internet
18553 Archive
</a
> (
3,
641,
797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
18554 can read by anyone and shared with anyone.
</p
>
18556 <p
>Update
2012-
10-
23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
18557 the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
18558 restored the account of the user, as reported by
18559 <a href=
"http://www.digi.no/
904675/helomvending-fra-amazon
">digi.no
</a
>
18560 and
<a href=
"http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/
1.8368487">NRK
</a
>.
18561 Apparently public pressure work. The story from Martin have seen
18562 several twitter messages per minute the last
24 hours, which is quite
18563 a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention. But even when the
18564 account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist. I recommend
18565 reading two opinions from
18566 <a href=
"http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/
2012/
10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm
">Simon
18567 Phipps
</a
> and
18568 <a href=
"http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/
2012/
10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm
">Glen
18569 Moody
</a
> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
18570 details about the original story.
</p
>
18575 <title>The fight for freedom and privacy
</title>
18576 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html
</link>
18577 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html
</guid>
18578 <pubDate>Thu,
18 Oct
2012 10:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
18579 <description><p
>Civil liberties and privacy in the western world are going down the
18580 drain, and it is hard to fight against it. I try to do my best, but
18581 time is limited. I hope you do your best too. A few years ago I came
18582 across a marvellous drawing by
18583 <a href=
"http://www.claybennett.com/about.html
">Clay Bennett
</a
>
18584 visualising some of what is going on.
18586 <p
><a href=
"http://www.claybennett.com/pages/security_fence.html
">
18587 <img src=
"http://www.claybennett.com/images/archivetoons/security_fence.jpg
"></a
></p
>
18590 «They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
18591 safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.» - Benjamin Franklin
18592 </blockquote
>
18594 <p
>Do you feel safe at the airport? I do not. Do you feel safe when
18595 you see a surveillance camera? I do not. Do you feel safe when you
18596 leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions? I do not. I
18597 just remember
<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
">the
18598 Panopticon
</a
>, and can not help to think that we are slowly
18599 transforming our society to a huge Panopticon on our own.
</p
>
18604 <title>ColonHelp produser sue WordPress to silence critic
</title>
18605 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html
</link>
18606 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html
</guid>
18607 <pubDate>Fri,
12 Oct
2012 23:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
18608 <description><p
>Thanks to a blog post by
18609 <a href=
"http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.no/
2012/
10/a-shitstorm-is-comming.html
">Eddy
18610 Petrișor
</a
>, I became aware of yet another
"alternative medicine
"
18611 company using legal intimidation tactics to scare off critics.
18612 According to the originating blog post about the detox
"cure
"
18613 <a href=
"http://insulaindoielii.wordpress.com/
2012/
10/
11/colon-help-sues-wordpress/
">ColonHelp
18614 and its producers Zenyth Pharmaceuticals actions
</a
>, the producer
18615 sues Wordpress to get rid of the critical information. To check if
18616 the story was for real, I contacted Automattic, the company behind
18617 wordpress.com, and they reply was
"We can confirm that Zenyth is
18618 seeking a court order against WordPress / Automattic. However, we
18619 don
't believe the Terms of Service have been violated in this
18620 matter
".
</p
>
18622 <p
>The story seem to be simply that a blogger checked the scientific
18623 foundation for a popular health product in Rumania, ColonHelp, and
18624 reported that there was no reason at all to believe it improved the
18625 health of its users. This caused the company behind the product,
18626 Zenyth Pharmaceuticals, to use legal intimidation to try to silence
18627 the critic, instead of presenting its views and scientific foundation
18628 to argue its side.
</p
>
18630 <p
>This is the usual story, and the Zenyth Pharmaceuticals company
18631 deserve everyone to know how it failed to act properly. Lets hope the
18632 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
">Streisand
18633 effect
</a
> can make it rethink its strategy.
</p
>
18635 <p
>What is the harm, you might think. I suggest you take a look at
18636 <a href=
"http://www.whatstheharm.net/detoxification.html
">a list of
18637 victims of detoxification
</a
>.
</p
>
18642 <title>Why is your local library collecting the
"wrong
" computer books?
</title>
18643 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_is_your_local_library_collecting_the__wrong__computer_books_.html
</link>
18644 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_is_your_local_library_collecting_the__wrong__computer_books_.html
</guid>
18645 <pubDate>Wed,
3 Oct
2012 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
18646 <description><p
>I just read the blog post from Tim Retout
18647 <a href=
"http://retout.co.uk/blog/
2012/
10/
02/the-library-challenge
">about
18648 the computer science book collection available in his local
18649 library
</a
>, and just wanted to share my comment on his theory about
18650 computer books becoming obsolete so soon. That is part of the reason
18651 why the selection is so sad in almost any local library (it is in mine
18652 too), but I believe the major contributing factor is that the people
18653 buying books to the library have no way to know a good and future
18654 computer classic from trash. And they need to know which one will
18655 become a classic in the future, as they would normally buy one of the
18656 recently published books.
</p
>
18658 <p
>During my university years, I worked for a while at the university
18659 library, and even there the person in charge of buying computer
18660 related books (and in fact any natural science related book), did not
18661 know enough about computers to make a good educated guess. Once, just
18662 before Christmas, they had some leftover money on the book budget and
18663 I was asked if I could pick out a lot of computer books in the
18664 university book store, for the library to buy for their collection. I
18665 had a great time picking all the books I dreamt of buying and reading,
18666 and the books I knew were classics (like most of the
18667 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens
">Stevens
18668 collection
</a
>). I picked several of the generic O
'Reilly books (ie
18669 documenting protocols, formats and systems, not specific versions of
18670 products) and stayed away from the
'teach yourself X in N days
' class.
18671 I had a great time, and probably picked out more than a hundred books
18672 for the library that evening.
</p
>
18674 <p
>The sad fact is that there is no way a overworked librarian is
18675 going to know that for example
18676 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming
">The
18677 Practice of Programming
</a
> is a must-have in any computer library,
18678 and they will most of the time end up picking the wrong books to buy.
18679 Perhaps you can help your local library make better choices by giving
18680 the suggestions for books to get? I know they would love to hear from
18681 you, even if their budget might block them from getting your favourite
18682 book right away.
</p
>
18687 <title>Seventy percent done with Norwegian docbook version of Free Culture
</title>
18688 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Seventy_percent_done_with_Norwegian_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html
</link>
18689 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Seventy_percent_done_with_Norwegian_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html
</guid>
18690 <pubDate>Sun,
23 Sep
2012 09:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
18691 <description><p
>Since this summer, I have worked in my spare time on a Norwegian
<a
18692 href=
"http://www.docbook.org/
">docbook
</a
> version of the
2004 book
<a
18693 href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
> by Lawrence Lessig.
18694 The reason is that this book is a great primer on what problems exist
18695 in the current copyright laws, and I want it to be available also for
18696 those that are reluctant do read an English book.
18699 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html
">called
18700 for volunteers
</a
> to help me, but too few have volunteered so far,
18701 and progress is a bit slow. Anyway, today I broken the
70 percent
18702 mark for the first rough translation. At the moment, less than
700
18703 strings (paragraphs, index terms, titles) are left to translate. With
18704 my current progress of
10-
20 strings per day, it will take a while to
18705 complete the translation. This graph show the updated progress:
</p
>
18707 <img width=
"80%
" align=
"center
" src=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png
">
18709 <p
>Progress have slowed down lately due to family and work
18710 commitments. If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out
18711 the project files currently available from
18712 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>.
</p
>
18714 <p
>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
18716 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true
">PDF
</a
>
18718 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true
">EPUB
</a
>
18719 are published on github. The HTML version is published as well, but
18720 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
18721 saw no point in linking to that version.
</p
>
18726 <title>Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda
</title>
18727 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html
</link>
18728 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html
</guid>
18729 <pubDate>Mon,
17 Sep
2012 14:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
18730 <description><p
>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
18731 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>
18732 community, I finally found time to wrap up another. This time it is
18733 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
18734 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
18735 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
18736 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.
</p
>
18738 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
18740 <p
>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
18741 in secondary (
15-
18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of
"light
"
18742 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
18743 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
18744 IT.
3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
18745 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
18746 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
18747 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
18748 training is anyway very important
</p
>
18750 <p
>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
18751 <a href=
"http://www.spse.ch/
">SPSE school
</a
> (secondary) is a very
18752 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
18753 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
18754 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
18756 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
18757 project?
</strong
></p
>
18759 <p
>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
18760 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
18761 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn
't
18762 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
18763 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
18766 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18767 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
18769 <p
>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
18770 very generous for help and hints. Chat help is crucial, together with
18771 the mailing list. Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
18772 engineered platform and you don
't have to start to build up your PDC
18773 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I
've already done this once and I
18774 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
18775 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
18776 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
18779 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18780 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
18782 <p
>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
18783 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
18784 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
18785 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
18786 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
18787 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
18788 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
18789 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)
</p
>
18791 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
18793 <p
>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
18794 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
18795 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
18796 <a href=
"http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html
">Perceus
</a
>
18797 has the same...
</p
>
18799 <p
>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
18800 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
18801 something breaks. Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
18802 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.
</p
>
18804 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
18805 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
18807 <P
>I think that the only real argument that school managers
"hear
" is
18808 cost reduction. They don
't give too much weight on quality, stability,
18809 just because they are normally not open to change.
</p
>
18811 <p
>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
18812 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
18813 don
't.
</p
>
18815 <p
>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
18816 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
18817 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had
20
18818 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
18819 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
18820 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
18821 Those who don
't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.
</p
>
18826 <title>IETF activity to standardise video codec
</title>
18827 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html
</link>
18828 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html
</guid>
18829 <pubDate>Sat,
15 Sep
2012 20:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
18830 <description><p
>After the
18831 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html
">Opus
18832 codec made
</a
> it into
<a href=
"http://www.ietf.org/
">IETF
</a
> as
18833 <a href=
"http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716
">RFC
6716</a
>, I had a look
18834 to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
18835 too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
18836 area. A non-
"working group
" mailing list
18837 <a href=
"https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec
">video-codec
</a
>
18839 <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
18840 formal working group should be formed.
</p
>
18842 <p
>I look forward to see how this plays out. There is already
18843 <a href=
"http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/video-codec/current/msg00003.html
">an
18844 email from someone
</a
> in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
18845 participate in the ISO group. Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
18846 that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
18847 multimedia formats requiring royalty payments, I suspect
18848 joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
18849 involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.
</p
>
18851 <p
>If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
18852 join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
18858 <title>IETF standardize its first multimedia codec: Opus
</title>
18859 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html
</link>
18860 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html
</guid>
18861 <pubDate>Wed,
12 Sep
2012 13:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
18862 <description><p
>Yesterday,
<a href=
"http://www.ietf.org/
">IETF
</a
> announced the
18864 <a href=
"http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716
">RFC
6716, the Definition
18865 of the Opus Audio Codec
</a
>, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec
18866 intended for both VoIP, film and music. This is the first time, as
18867 far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec. In
18868 <a href=
"http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3533
">RFC
3533</a
>, IETF
18869 standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great
18870 royalty free container for audio, video and movies. I hope IETF will
18871 continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG
18872 have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish
18873 multimedia content on the Internet.
</p
>
18875 <p
>IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to
18876 ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty
18877 free specifications. Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and
18878 poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet.
</p
>
18880 <p
>Visit the
<a href=
"http://opus-codec.org/
">Opus project page
</a
> if
18881 you want to learn more about the solution.
</p
>
18886 <title>Git repository for song book for Computer Scientists
</title>
18887 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html
</link>
18888 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html
</guid>
18889 <pubDate>Fri,
7 Sep
2012 13:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
18890 <description><p
>As I
18891 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html
">mentioned
18892 this summer
</a
>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
18893 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
18894 <a href=
"https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook
">Gitorious
18895 repository for the project
</a
>.
</p
>
18897 <p
>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
18898 to the HTML version. To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
18899 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
18900 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.
</p
>
18902 <p
>Want to sing? You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
18903 PostScript formats at
18904 <a href=
"http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/
">Petter
's Computer
18905 Science Songbook
</a
>.
</p
>
18910 <title>Free software forced Microsoft to open Office (and don
't forget Officeshots)
</title>
18911 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_forced_Microsoft_to_open_Office__and_don_t_forget_Officeshots_.html
</link>
18912 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_forced_Microsoft_to_open_Office__and_don_t_forget_Officeshots_.html
</guid>
18913 <pubDate>Thu,
23 Aug
2012 14:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
18914 <description><p
>I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how
18915 <a href=
"http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsoft-was-forced-open-office-
200233">Microsoft
18916 have been forced to open Office
</a
>, and it made me remember and
18917 revisit the great site
18918 <a href=
"http://www.officeshots.org/
">officeshots
</a
> which allow you
18919 to check out how different programs present the ODF file format. I
18920 recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)
</p
>
18925 <title>Half way there with translated docbook version of Free Culture
</title>
18926 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_way_there_with_translated_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html
</link>
18927 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_way_there_with_translated_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html
</guid>
18928 <pubDate>Fri,
17 Aug
2012 21:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
18929 <description><p
>In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian
18930 <a href=
"http://www.docbook.org/
">docbook
</a
> version of the
2004 book
18931 <a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
> by Lawrence Lessig,
18932 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law
18933 I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an
18934 English book. It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever
18935 expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society. When the
18936 translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy
18937 to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down
18938 to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law. This
18940 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html
">called
18941 for volunteers
</a
> to help me, and I have been able to secure the
18942 valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.
</p
>
18944 <p
>Two days ago, we finally broke the
50% mark. Then more than
50% of
18945 the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also
18946 titles and index entries are also counted). All parts from the
18947 beginning up to and including chapter four is translated. So is
18948 chapters six, seven and the conclusion. I created a graph to show the
18949 progress:
</p
>
18951 <img width=
"80%
" align=
"center
" src=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png
">
18953 <p
>The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index
18954 entries into the docbook. They were missing with the docbook version
18955 I initially started with. There are still quite a few index entries
18956 missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done. I
18957 currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete
18958 english version of the docbook source.
</p
>
18960 <p
>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
18961 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
18962 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
18963 translation and proof reading. And I would like the figures to be
18964 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them. Any SVG master
18965 around? I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to
18966 me. If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the
18967 project files currently available from
<a
18968 href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>.
</p
>
18970 <p
>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
18972 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true
">PDF
</a
>
18974 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true
">EPUB
</a
>
18975 are published on github. The HTML version is published as well, but
18976 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
18977 saw no point in linking to that version.
</p
>
18982 <title>Notes on language codes for Norwegian docbook processing...
</title>
18983 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Notes_on_language_codes_for_Norwegian_docbook_processing___.html
</link>
18984 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Notes_on_language_codes_for_Norwegian_docbook_processing___.html
</guid>
18985 <pubDate>Fri,
10 Aug
2012 21:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
18986 <description><p
>In
<a href=
"http://www.docbook.org/
">docbook
</a
> one can specify
18987 the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
18988 this information to pick the correct translations for
'chapter
',
'see
18989 also
',
'index
' etc. And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
18990 this work just fine. For example a German user can start the document
18991 with
&lt;book lang=
"de
"&gt;, and the document will show up with the
18992 correct content with any of the docbook processors. This is not the
18993 case for the language
18994 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html
">I
18995 am working with at the moment
</a
>, Norwegian Bokmål.
</p
>
18997 <p
>For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
18998 because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
18999 all tools. I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
19000 dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way. Some
19001 of them do not handle it at all.
</p
>
19003 <p
>A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
19004 this mess. Norwegian is not one, but two written variants. The
19005 variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål. There are three
19006 two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
19007 is
'no
', Norwegian Nynorsk is
'nn
' and Norwegian Bokmål is
'nb
'.
19008 Historically the
'no
' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
19009 many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
19010 is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
19011 In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure
'no
' was an
19012 alias for
'nb
'.
</p
>
19014 <p
>Back to docbook processing tools in Debian. The dblatex tool only
19015 understand
'nn
'. There are translations for
'no
', but not
'nb
' (BTS
19016 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
684391">#
684391</a
>), but due to a bug
19017 (BTS
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
682936">#
682936</a
>) the
'no
'
19018 language code is not recognised. The docbook-xsl tool chain only
19019 recognise
'nn
' and
'nb
', but not
'no
'. The xmlto tool only recognise
19020 'nn
' and
'nb
', but not
'no
'. The end result that there is no language
19021 code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
19022 at the same time. :(
</p
>
19024 <p
>The correct solution is to use
&lt;book lang=
"nb
"&gt;, but it will
19025 take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
19026 processors. :(
</p
>
19028 <p
>Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/
</p
>
19033 <title>Best way to create a docbook book?
</title>
19034 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html
</link>
19035 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html
</guid>
19036 <pubDate>Tue,
31 Jul
2012 22:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19037 <description><p
>I tried to send this text to the
19038 <a href=
"https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/
">docbook-apps
19039 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org
</a
>, but it only accept messages
19040 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
19041 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
19042 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
19045 <p
>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
19046 learning curve at the moment.
</p
>
19048 <p
>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
19049 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
19050 docbook to handle the process. The files to build the book are
19052 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>.
19053 The book got around
400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
19054 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
19055 software docbook processors. My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
19058 <p
>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
19059 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
19060 formats. I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
19061 problems.
</p
>
19065 <li
>Using dblatex, the
&lt;part
&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
19066 as
&lt;/part
&gt; do not really end the
&lt;part
&gt;. (See
19067 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
683166">BTS report #
683166</a
>), the
19068 xetex backend (needed to process UTF-
8) give incorrect hyphens in
19069 index references spanning several pages (See
19070 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
682901">BTS report #
682901</a
>), and
19071 I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
19072 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
682936">BTS report #
682936</a
>).
</li
>
19074 <li
>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
19075 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
683163">BTS report
19076 #
683163</a
>).
</li
>
19078 <li
>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
19079 show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
19080 footnote and text body, see
19081 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
683197">BTS report #
683197</a
>), and
19082 fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
19083 refs listed are not right).
</li
>
19085 <li
>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.
</li
>
19087 <li
>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
19088 index problems the xmlto + fop processing.
</li
>
19092 <p
>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
19093 of this book? Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
19094 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?
</p
>
19096 <p
>What about HTML and EPUB versions?
</p
>
19101 <title>Free Culture in Norwegian -
5 chapters done,
74 percent left to do
</title>
19102 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html
</link>
19103 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html
</guid>
19104 <pubDate>Sat,
21 Jul
2012 20:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19105 <description><p
>I reported earlier that I am working on
19106 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html
">a
19107 norwegian version
</a
> of the book
19108 <a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
> by Lawrence Lessig.
19109 Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
19110 Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six. The source files as well as a
19111 PDF and EPUB version of this book are available from
19112 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>.
</p
>
19114 <p
>I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
19115 (preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
19116 completely translated. This completes
26 percent of the number of
19117 strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus
74
19118 percent left to translate. A graph of the progress is present at the
19119 bottom of the github project page. There is still room for more
19120 contributors. Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
19121 you got time and are willing to help make this book make it to
19122 print. :)
</p
>
19124 <p
>The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
19125 translations, if you want the book to be available in your
19126 language.
</p
>
19131 <title>Call for help from docbook expert to tag Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig
</title>
19132 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Call_for_help_from_docbook_expert_to_tag_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig.html
</link>
19133 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Call_for_help_from_docbook_expert_to_tag_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig.html
</guid>
19134 <pubDate>Mon,
16 Jul
2012 22:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19135 <description><p
>I am currently working on a
19136 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html
">project
19137 to translate
</a
> the book
19138 <a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
> by Lawrence Lessig
19139 to Norwegian. And the source we base our translation on is the
19140 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook
">docbook
</a
> version, to
19141 allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
19142 this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
19143 tagged. The source files of this project is available from
19144 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>.
</p
>
19146 <p
>The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
19147 no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert. Is there a
19148 docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
19149 well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
19150 for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book? This will provide a
19151 well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
19152 easier for us to create a good Norwegian version. If you can and want
19153 to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
19154 send pull requests with fixes. :)
</p
>
19159 <title>Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg
</title>
19160 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html
</link>
19161 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html
</guid>
19162 <pubDate>Mon,
9 Jul
2012 00:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19163 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
19164 Skolelinux
</a
> project have users all over the globe, but until
19165 recently we have not known about any users in Norway
's neighbour
19166 country Sweden. This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
19167 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
19168 to adjust and scale the just released
19169 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2012/
20120311.html
">Debian Edu
19170 Wheezy
</a
> setup to his liking. He granted me an interview, and I am
19171 happy to share his answers with you here.
</p
>
19173 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
19175 <p
>I
'm a
44 year old country guy that have been working
12 years at
19176 the same school as
50% IT-manager and
50% Teacher. My educational
19177 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
19178 "folkhighschool
" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups. In
19179 Norwegian I believe it
's called
"Vuxenupplaring
". I also have a master
19180 in
"Technology and social change
". So I
'm not really a tech guy, I
19181 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
19182 perspective when working with IT.
</p
>
19184 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19185 project?
</strong
></p
>
19187 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
19188 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
19189 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
19190 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
19191 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
19192 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
19194 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19195 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
19197 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
19198 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
19199 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
19200 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
19201 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
19202 well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
19203 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
19204 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
19205 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
19206 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to
"beat around the bush
" by
19207 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
19208 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
19209 thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
19210 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
19211 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
19212 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
19213 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
19214 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time. Our
19215 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
19216 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
19217 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
19218 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit
"oldish
" applications. Debian is
19221 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19222 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
19224 <p
>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
19225 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
19226 year (
2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
19227 sound from working with them. It
's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
19228 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
19229 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.
</p
>
19231 <p
>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
19232 install time. In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
19233 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
19234 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
19235 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
19236 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
19237 support for single-sign on. That will make the transition to free
19238 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
19239 need. No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
19240 some applications can
't be open source. As for us we really need to
19241 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes. We run a journalist
19242 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
19243 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association). Our
19244 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
19245 are done. This is important if you want to get a job.
</p
>
19247 <p
>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
19248 magazines. We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
19249 market to Adobe. The only
"equivalent
" to InDesign in the opensource
19250 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
19251 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
19252 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
19253 edit and compile a newspaper. But politically at our school we are not
19254 there yet. And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.
</p
>
19256 <p
>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
19257 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
19258 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
19259 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
19260 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
19261 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
19262 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
19263 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise. Those
19264 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
19265 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
19266 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
19267 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
19268 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
19269 sound file.
</p
>
19271 <p
>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
19272 will try. The problem is the students have certain expectations when
19273 they start an education towards a profession. So the programs has to
19274 look and feel professional. Good thing with radio, there are many
19275 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
19276 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
19277 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
19278 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
19279 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.
</p
>
19281 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
19283 <p
>Myself I
'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days. I use almost
19284 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
19285 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
19288 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
19289 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
19291 <p
>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
19292 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
19293 it
's also very important that the multimedia support is working
19294 flawlessly. The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
19295 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
19296 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
19297 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
19298 idea. It
's also important that the open source software works even for
19299 the administration. It
's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
19300 open source, if the principal has to run Windows. It also creates a
19301 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
19302 will create a difference in
"status
" between classes, so a good
19303 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
19304 desktop is essential. At least at our school, where we have mixed
19305 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.
</p
>
19307 <p
>Update
2012-
07-
09 08:
30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
19308 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
19309 article
<a href=
"https://lwn.net/Articles/
481607/
">Radio station
19310 management with Airtime
</a
>,
19311 <a href=
"http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/
">Airtime
</a
> which
19312 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
19313 <a href=
"http://www.rivendellaudio.org/
">Rivendell
</a
> which claim to
19314 be complete radio broadcast automation solution. All of them seem
19315 useful to the aspiring radio producer.
</p
>
19320 <title>Why do schools waste money on IT?
</title>
19321 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html
</link>
19322 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html
</guid>
19323 <pubDate>Sun,
8 Jul
2012 09:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19324 <description><p
>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
19325 of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
19326 in schools and municipalities. We provide what the happy users of
19327 Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
19328 alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution. I
19329 was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
19330 Steinberg in his blog post
19331 "<a href=
"http://www.mysociety.org/
2012/
06/
19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/
">Can
19332 you recognize the million pound chair?
</a
>". Read it and weep for the
19333 spending of your tax money.
</p
>
19335 <p
>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
19336 projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
19337 causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
19338 to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
19339 public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
19340 purchases.
</p
>
19345 <title>Free Timetabling Software - nice free software
</title>
19346 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html
</link>
19347 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html
</guid>
19348 <pubDate>Sat,
7 Jul
2012 09:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19349 <description><p
>Included in
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
19350 Skolelinux
</a
> is a large collection of end user and school specific
19351 software. It is one of the packages not installed by default but
19352 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
19353 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
19354 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
19355 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
19356 receive. The software is
19358 <a href=
"http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/
">named FET
</a
>, and it provide a
19359 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
19360 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
19361 both teachers and students. It is available both for
19362 <a href=
"http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html
">Linux, MacOSX and
19363 Windows
</a
>.
</p
>
19365 <p
>This is
<a href=
"http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html
">the
19366 feature list
</a
>, liftet from the project web site:
</p
>
19368 <p
><ul
>
19370 <li
>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
19371 You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it
</li
>
19373 <li
>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
19374 (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
19375 (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
19376 (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
19377 (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
19378 (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
19379 sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
19380 (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
19383 <li
>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
19384 semi-automatic or manual allocation
</li
>
19386 <li
>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
19387 GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports
</li
>
19389 <li
>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
19390 with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)
</li
>
19392 <li
>Import/export from CSV format
</li
>
19394 <li
>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
19395 formats
</li
>
19397 <li
>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
19398 and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
19399 non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
19400 (as separate sets)
</li
>
19402 <li
>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from
0.0% to
100.0%
19403 (but some special constraints are allowed to have only
100% weight
19404 percentage)
</li
>
19406 <li
>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
19407 demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
19410 <li
>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day:
60</li
>
19411 <li
>Maximum number of working days per week:
35</li
>
19412 <li
>Maximum total number of teachers:
6000</li
>
19413 <li
>Maximum total number of sets of students:
30000</li
>
19414 <li
>Maximum total number of subjects:
6000</li
>
19415 <li
>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags
</li
>
19416 <li
>Maximum number of activities:
30000</li
>
19417 <li
>Maximum number of rooms:
6000</li
>
19418 <li
>Maximum number of buildings:
6000</li
>
19419 <li
>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
19420 students sets for each activity. (it is possible
19421 also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
19422 activity)
</li
>
19423 <li
>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints
</li
>
19424 <li
>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints
</li
>
19425 </ul
></li
>
19427 <li
>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
19429 <li
>Break periods
</li
>
19430 <li
>For teacher(s):
19432 <li
>Not available periods
</li
>
19433 <li
>Max/min days per week
</li
>
19434 <li
>Max gaps per day/week
</li
>
19435 <li
>Max hours daily/continuously
</li
>
19436 <li
>Min hours daily
</li
>
19437 <li
>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag
</li
>
19439 <li
>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
19440 days per week
</li
>
19441 </ul
></li
>
19442 <li
>For students (sets):
19444 <li
>Not available periods
</li
>
19445 <li
>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)
</li
>
19446 <li
>Max gaps per day/week
</li
>
19447 <li
>Max hours daily/continuously
</li
>
19448 <li
>Min hours daily
</li
>
19449 <li
>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag
</li
>
19451 <li
>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
19452 days per week
</li
>
19453 </ul
></li
>
19454 <li
>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
19456 <li
>A single preferred starting time
</li
>
19457 <li
>A set of preferred starting times
</li
>
19458 <li
>A set of preferred time slots
</li
>
19459 <li
>Min/max days between them
</li
>
19460 <li
>End(s) students day
</li
>
19461 <li
>Same starting time/day/hour
</li
>
19462 <li
>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
19463 flexible constraint, useful in many situations)
</li
>
19464 <li
>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for
2 or
3 (sub)activities)
</li
>
19465 <li
>Not overlapping
</li
>
19466 <li
>Max simultaneous in selected time slots
</li
>
19467 <li
>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities
</li
>
19468 </ul
></li
>
19469 </ul
></li
>
19471 <li
>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
19473 <li
>Room not available periods
</li
>
19474 <li
>For teacher(s):
19476 <li
>Home room(s)
</li
>
19477 <li
>Max building changes per day/week
</li
>
19478 <li
>Min gaps between building changes
</li
>
19482 <li
>For students (sets):
19484 <li
>Home room(s)
</li
>
19485 <li
>Max building changes per day/week
</li
>
19486 <li
>Min gaps between building changes
</li
>
19489 <li
>Preferred room(s):
19491 <li
>For a subject
</li
>
19492 <li
>For an activity tag
</li
>
19493 <li
>For a subject and an activity tag
</li
>
19494 <li
>Individually for a (sub)activity
</li
>
19498 <li
>For a set of activities:
19500 <li
>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms
</li
>
19505 </ul
></p
>
19507 <p
>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
19508 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it. If you
19509 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
19510 manually, check it out.
19512 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
19513 <a href=
"http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/
2012/
03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/
">a
19514 blog post from MarvelSoft
</a
>. If you find FET useful, please provide
19515 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
19516 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos
">Debian Edu HowTo
19517 section
</a
>.
</p
>
19522 <title>Can Zimbra be told to send autoreplies to the From: address?
</title>
19523 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Can_Zimbra_be_told_to_send_autoreplies_to_the_From__address_.html
</link>
19524 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Can_Zimbra_be_told_to_send_autoreplies_to_the_From__address_.html
</guid>
19525 <pubDate>Tue,
3 Jul
2012 23:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19526 <description><p
>In the NUUG
<a href=
"http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi
</a
>
19527 project (Norwegian version of
19528 <a href=
"http://www.fixmystreet.com/
">FixMyStreet
</a
> from
19529 <a href=
"http://www.mysociety.org/
">mySociety
</a
>), we have discovered
19530 a problem with the municipalities using
19531 <a href=
"http://www.zimbra.com/
">Zimbra
</a
>. When FiksGataMi send a
19532 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
19533 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
19534 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address. The intention is to make
19535 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
19536 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
19537 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
19538 Zimbra. Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
19539 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
19540 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
19541 the From: header.
</p
>
19543 <p
>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
19544 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
19545 problem. We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
19546 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
19547 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports. We have been in
19548 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
19549 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
19550 behaviour.
</p
>
19552 <p
>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
19553 to the specification in RFC
3834, which recommend that vacation
19554 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
19555 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
19556 differently. Anyone know? Please let us know at
19557 <a href=
"http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami
">fiksgatami
19558 (at) nuug.no
</a
>.
</p
>
19563 <title>Debian Edu interview: José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez
</title>
19564 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jos__Luis_Redrejo_Rodr_guez.html
</link>
19565 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jos__Luis_Redrejo_Rodr_guez.html
</guid>
19566 <pubDate>Tue,
26 Jun
2012 08:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19567 <description><p
>I
've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
19568 another interview with the people behind
19569 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>.
19570 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
19571 helpers from Spain. His effort was the reason we added support for
19572 several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
19573 Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
19574 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2012/
20120311.html
">Debian Edu
19575 Squeeze
</a
> version.
</p
>
19577 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
19579 <p
>I
'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
19580 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
19581 ICT in schools
</p
>
19583 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19584 project?
</strong
></p
>
19586 <p
>At
2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
19587 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
19588 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
19589 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.
</p
>
19591 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19592 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
19594 <p
>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
19595 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
19596 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
19597 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.
</p
>
19599 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19600 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
19602 <p
>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
19603 economical and technical resources in the different countries don
't
19604 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
19605 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
19606 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
19607 technologies in school.
</p
>
19609 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
19611 <p
>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
19612 between Iceweasel,
<a href=
"http://www.geany.org/
">Geany
</a
> and
19613 <a href=
"http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator
">Terminator
</a
>.
</p
>
19615 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
19616 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
19618 <p
>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
19619 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
19620 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
19621 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.
</p
>
19623 <p
>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
19624 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
19625 universities. So different strategies are needed.
</p
>
19627 <p
>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
19628 we
've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
19629 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
19630 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
19631 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
19632 using wireless. I think we
'll see more and more personal devices in
19633 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
19634 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
19635 working there.
</p
>
19640 <title>Song book for Computer Scientists
</title>
19641 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html
</link>
19642 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html
</guid>
19643 <pubDate>Sun,
24 Jun
2012 13:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19644 <description><p
>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
19645 <a href=
"http://www.uit.no/
">University of Tromsø
</a
>, I started
19646 collecting computer related songs for use at parties. The original
19647 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
19648 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
19649 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format. I have
19650 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
19651 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
19652 help me extend and update the book. If anyone is volunteering to help
19653 me with this, send me an email. Also let me know if there are songs
19654 missing in my book.
</p
>
19656 <p
>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
19657 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
19658 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
19659 Especially now that
<a href=
"http://debconf12.debconf.org/
">Debconf
19660 12</a
> is about to start (and I am not going). Want to sing? Check
19661 out
<a href=
"http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/
">Petter
's
19662 Computer Science Songbook
</a
>.
19667 <title>Debian Edu - some ideas for the future versions
</title>
19668 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___some_ideas_for_the_future_versions.html
</link>
19669 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___some_ideas_for_the_future_versions.html
</guid>
19670 <pubDate>Mon,
11 Jun
2012 14:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19671 <description><p
>During my work on
19672 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2012/
20120311.nb.html
">Debian Edu
19673 based on Squeeze
</a
>, I came across some issues that should be
19674 addressed in the Wheezy release. I finally found time to wrap up my
19675 notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
19676 explanation.
</p
>
19678 <p
><ul
>
19680 <li
>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
19681 changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
19682 with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
19683 system depend on tasksel tasks in
19684 /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
19685 installation.
</li
>
19687 <li
>Enable Kerberos login for more services. Now with the Kerberos
19688 foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
19689 services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions. We should
19690 at least try to enable it for these services:
19693 <li
>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
19695 <li
>Nagios for admins checking the system status.
</li
>
19696 <li
>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.
</li
>
19697 <li
>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.
</li
>
19698 <li
>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.
</li
>
19699 <li
>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.
</li
>
19701 </ul
></li
>
19703 <li
>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
19704 authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
19705 use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
19706 is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind
</li
>
19708 <li
>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install. The split made
19709 sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
19710 inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.
</li
>
19712 <li
>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
19713 touching the disk if the disk is too small. This is
19714 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
653305">BTS report #
653305</a
> and the
19715 d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
19716 it and upload. After this is done we need to adjust
19717 debian-edu-install to use this new hook.
</li
>
19719 <li
>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
19720 time config). LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
19721 packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
19724 <li
>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
19725 the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
19726 up KDE login on slow networks.
</li
>
19728 <li
>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
19729 change on first login. This is useful when handing out password on
19730 paper, to make sure only the user know the password. This require
19731 fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.
</li
>
19733 <li
>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
19734 The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
19735 familiar with GUIs. This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
19736 have it available where the admin will be looking for it..
</li
>
19738 <li
>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
19739 actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses). None of the
19740 Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.
</li
>
19742 <li
>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
19743 using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
19744 packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.
</li
>
19746 <li
>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
19747 when changing password using the Kerberos protocol. The hook was
19748 requested in
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
588968">BTS report
19749 #
588968</a
> and is now available in Wheezy. We might need to write a
19750 MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.
</li
>
19752 <li
>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
19755 <li
>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers
</li
>
19756 <li
>consider dropping xpaint
</li
>
19757 <li
>and probably more?
</li
>
19758 </ul
></li
>
19760 <li
>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly. This is
19761 mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
19762 examples too. For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
19763 firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
19764 some GUI to do this. Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
19765 could consider using their packages. At the moment we have some
19766 command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
19767 for the LTSP chroot).
</li
>
19770 <li
>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options. We
19771 should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
19772 install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
19775 <li
>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
19776 interesting educational packages. We should work on the package
19777 tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
19778 packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
19779 new applications with a simple mouse click.
</li
>
19781 <li
>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
19782 with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
19783 be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
19784 filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled. We should
19785 implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
19786 instead of the
"it is documented
" method of today.
</li
>
19788 <li
>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
19789 "take over
" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
19790 There are at least three implementations,
19791 <a href=
"italc.sourceforge.net/
">italc
</a
>,
19792 <a href=
"http://www.itais.net/help/en/
">controlaula
</a
> og
19793 <a href=
"http://www.epoptes.org/
">epoptes
</a
> and we should pick one of
19794 them and make it trivial to set it up in a school. The challenges is
19795 how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
19796 and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
19797 given room.
</li
>
19799 <li
>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
19800 should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
19801 the Debian Edu network. Not quite sure how. Perhaps we should
19802 provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
19803 them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
19804 configuration and data with the central server. This should be
19805 investigated.
</li
>
19807 </ul
></p
>
19809 <p
>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
19815 <title>TV with face recognition, for improved viewer experience
</title>
19816 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/TV_with_face_recognition__for_improved_viewer_experience.html
</link>
19817 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/TV_with_face_recognition__for_improved_viewer_experience.html
</guid>
19818 <pubDate>Sat,
9 Jun
2012 22:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19819 <description><p
>Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
19820 <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
19821 with face recognition
</a
> to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
19822 me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
19823 recognition on the TV image itself. It could let the viewer know who
19824 is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
19825 company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
19826 evaluate what is being said and done. That would be a feature I would
19827 be willing to pay for.
</p
>
19829 <p
>I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
19830 household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
19831 It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
19832 <a href=
"http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/
0100021.txt
">1984 by George
19833 Orwell
</a
>.
</p
>
19838 <title>Web service to look up HP and Dell computer hardware support status
</title>
19839 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_service_to_look_up_HP_and_Dell_computer_hardware_support_status.html
</link>
19840 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_service_to_look_up_HP_and_Dell_computer_hardware_support_status.html
</guid>
19841 <pubDate>Wed,
6 Jun
2012 23:
15:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19842 <description><p
>A few days ago
19843 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html
">I
19844 reported how to get
</a
> the support status out of Dell using an
19845 unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
19846 <a href=
"http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/
2012-February/
045959.html
">discovered
19847 by Daniel De Marco in february
</a
>. Combined with my web scraping
19848 code for HP, Dell and IBM
19849 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html
">from
19850 2009</a
>, I got inspired and wrote
19851 <a href=
"https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/
">a
19852 web service
</a
> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
19853 support status and get a machine readable result back.
</p
>
19855 <p
>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
19858 <blockquote
><pre
>
19859 % 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
>
19860 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
":
""})
19862 </pre
></blockquote
>
19864 <p
>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
19865 support for other vendors. The python source is available on
19866 Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.
</p
>
19871 <title>Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel
</title>
19872 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html
</link>
19873 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html
</guid>
19874 <pubDate>Sat,
2 Jun
2012 15:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19875 <description><p
>Back in
2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
19876 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>
19877 mailing list. He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
19878 thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
19879 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2012/
20120311.html
">Debian Edu
19880 Squeeze
</a
> version.
</p
>
19882 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
19884 <p
>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am
38 years old and live near Kiel,
19885 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
19886 (Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
19887 by Angela).
</p
>
19889 <p
>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
19890 and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
19891 touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
19892 the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
19893 becoming an osteopath.
</p
>
19895 <p
>Starting in
2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
19896 have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
19897 introducing free software into schools. The project
's name is
19898 "IT-Zukunft Schule
" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
19899 skills with communication skills.
</p
>
19901 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19902 project?
</strong
></p
>
19904 <p
>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
19905 "IT-Zukunft Schule
" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
19906 reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
19907 people said. From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
19908 distributions that target being used for school networks.
</p
>
19910 <p
>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
19911 commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
19912 Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between
12/
2010 and
03/
2011 we
19913 went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
19914 and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
19915 Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
19916 got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
19917 attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
19918 the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.
</p
>
19920 <p
>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
19921 people. People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
19922 protection experts, other IT professionals.
</p
>
19924 <p
>We came to two conclusions:
</p
>
19926 <p
>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
19927 bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
19928 by
100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
19929 whereas most of each school
's requirements could mapped by a standard
19930 IT solution. The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
19931 customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
19932 possible. In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
19933 standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
19934 degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
19935 locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
19938 <p
>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
19939 all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
19940 for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
19941 has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
19942 of people into using IT and teaching with IT.
"IT-Zukunft Schule
"
19943 tries to provide an approach for this.
</p
>
19945 <p
>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
19946 defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
19947 Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school
's IT
19948 equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
19949 teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
19950 spare time.
</p
>
19952 <p
>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
19953 networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
19954 here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
19955 teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
19956 non-existent until
2010/
2011.
</p
>
19958 <p
>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
19959 class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
19960 avoidance do exist.
</p
>
19962 <p
>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
19963 social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
19964 for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
19965 several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
19966 they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
19967 at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
19968 and probably a gain for all.
</p
>
19970 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19971 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
19973 <p
>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
19974 any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
19975 the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
19976 workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
19977 project communication, honest communication within the group of
19978 developers, etc.
</p
>
19980 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19981 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
19983 <p
>Every coin has two sides:
</p
>
19985 <p
>Technically:
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
311188">BTS issue
19986 #
311188</a
>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
19987 client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
19988 should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
19989 about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
19990 several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
19991 contribute).
</p
>
19993 <p
>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
19994 find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
19995 Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
19996 promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
19997 there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
19998 these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
19999 all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
20000 meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
20001 there being rather disconnected from the development department of
20002 Debian Edu / Skolelinux.
</p
>
20004 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
20006 <p
>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.
</p
>
20008 <p
>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
20009 serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
20010 more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.
</p
>
20012 <p
>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In
2010 I started the
20013 development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
20014 PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
20015 is being integrated in Ubuntu
's software center.
</p
>
20017 <p
>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
20018 as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
20019 I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
20020 the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
20021 whiteboard.
</p
>
20023 <p
>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE
's Yakuake.
</p
>
20025 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20026 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
20028 <p
>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
20029 enrol people.
</p
>
20034 <title>SOAP based webservice from Dell to check server support status
</title>
20035 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html
</link>
20036 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html
</guid>
20037 <pubDate>Fri,
1 Jun
2012 15:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
20038 <description><p
>A few years ago I wrote
20039 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html
">how
20040 to extract support status
</a
> for your Dell and HP servers. Recently
20041 I have learned from colleges here at the
20042 <a href=
"http://www.uio.no/
">University of Oslo
</a
> that Dell have
20043 made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service. Given
20044 the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
20045 readable information about the support status. This perl code
20046 demonstrate how to do it:
</p
>
20048 <p
><pre
>
20053 my $GUID =
'11111111-
1111-
1111-
1111-
111111111111';
20054 my $App =
'test
';
20055 my $servicetag = $ARGV[
0] or die
"Please supply a servicetag. $!\n
";
20056 my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
20058 -
> uri(
'http://support.dell.com/WebServices/
')
20059 -
> on_action( sub { join
'', @_ } )
20060 -
> proxy(
'http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx
')
20062 my $a = $s-
>GetAssetInformation(
20063 SOAP::Data-
>name(
'guid
')-
>value($GUID)-
>type(
''),
20064 SOAP::Data-
>name(
'applicationName
')-
>value($App)-
>type(
''),
20065 SOAP::Data-
>name(
'serviceTags
')-
>value($servicetag)-
>type(
''),
20067 print Dumper($a -
> result) ;
20068 </pre
></p
>
20070 <p
>The output can look like this:
</p
>
20072 <p
><pre
>
20074 'Asset
' =
> {
20075 'Entitlements
' =
> {
20076 'EntitlementData
' =
> [
20078 'EntitlementType
' =
> 'Expired
',
20079 'EndDate
' =
> '2009-
07-
29T00:
00:
00',
20080 'Provider
' =
> '',
20081 'StartDate
' =
> '2006-
07-
29T00:
00:
00',
20082 'DaysLeft
' =
> '0'
20085 'EntitlementType
' =
> 'Expired
',
20086 'EndDate
' =
> '2009-
07-
29T00:
00:
00',
20087 'Provider
' =
> '',
20088 'StartDate
' =
> '2006-
07-
29T00:
00:
00',
20089 'DaysLeft
' =
> '0'
20092 'EntitlementType
' =
> 'Expired
',
20093 'EndDate
' =
> '2007-
07-
29T00:
00:
00',
20094 'Provider
' =
> '',
20095 'StartDate
' =
> '2006-
07-
29T00:
00:
00',
20096 'DaysLeft
' =
> '0'
20100 'AssetHeaderData
' =
> {
20101 'SystemModel
' =
> 'GX620
',
20102 'ServiceTag
' =
> '8DSGD2J
',
20103 'SystemShipDate
' =
> '2006-
07-
29T19:
00:
00-
05:
00',
20104 'Buid
' =
> '2323',
20105 'Region
' =
> 'Europe
',
20106 'SystemID
' =
> 'PLX_GX620
',
20107 'SystemType
' =
> 'OptiPlex
'
20111 </pre
></p
>
20113 <p
>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
20114 service outside the
20115 <a href=
"http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation
">inline
20116 documentation
</a
>, and according to
20117 <a href=
"http://iboyd.net/index.php/
2012/
02/
14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/
">one
20118 comment
</a
> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
20119 scraping HTML pages. :)
</p
>
20121 <p
>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service. If
20122 you know of one, drop me an email. :)
</p
>
20127 <title>First monitor calibration using ColorHug
</title>
20128 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html
</link>
20129 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html
</guid>
20130 <pubDate>Thu,
31 May
2012 22:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
20131 <description><p
>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
20132 <a href=
"http://www.hughski.com/index.html
">ColorHug
</a
> arrived in the
20133 mail, and I
've had a few days to test it. As all my machines are
20134 running Debian Squeeze, where
20135 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html
">the
20136 calibration software
</a
> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
20137 I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD. This worked
20138 just fine. So far I have only done the quick calibration. It was
20139 slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
20140 another day.
</p
>
20142 <p
>After calibration, I get a
20143 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile
">ICC color
20144 profile
</a
> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
20145 tools. KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
20146 for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
20147 xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
20148 monitor setups. But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
20149 attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
20150 monitor. After searching a bit, I
20151 <a href=
"http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=
1347896">discovered
</a
>
20152 that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
20153 and a simple
</p
>
20155 <p
><pre
>
20156 dispwin -d
1 profile.icc
20157 </pre
></p
>
20159 <p
>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor. The
20160 result was a bit more pink than I expected. I guess I picked the
20161 wrong monitor type for the
"led
" monitor I got, but the result is good
20162 enough for now.
</p
>
20167 <title>Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter
</title>
20168 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html
</link>
20169 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html
</guid>
20170 <pubDate>Sun,
27 May
2012 17:
15:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
20171 <description><p
>In
2003, a German teacher showed up on the
20172 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>
20173 mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
20174 up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils. His name was Ralf
20175 Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
20176 since then, helping to make sure the
20177 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2012/
20120311.html
">Debian Edu
20178 Squeeze
</a
> release became as good as it is..
</p
>
20180 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
20182 <p
>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
20183 Mathematics, and Computer Science (
"Informatik
"). During the past
12
20184 years (since
2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
20185 also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
20186 O- or A-level (
"Abitur
"). For quite as long, I
've been taking care of
20187 our computer network.
</p
>
20189 <p
>Now, in my early
40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
20190 spare time together with my wife, our son (
3 years) and our daughter
20191 (
4 months).
</p
>
20193 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20194 project?
</strong
></p
>
20196 <p
>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
20197 my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
20198 very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
20199 (
"Best Newcomer Distribution
", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
20200 to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt,
2005 (IIRC). Few
20201 months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
20202 (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others. For more
20203 than
7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
20204 our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
20205 approximately
50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
20206 locally installed Skolelinux image. As a consequence, I joined quite
20207 a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
20208 (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
20209 one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.
</p
>
20211 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20212 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
20214 <p
>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
20215 project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
20216 the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
20217 computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
20218 free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
20219 up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
20220 labs). Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
20221 administration costs tend towards zero.
</p
>
20223 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20224 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
20226 <p
>While Debian
's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
20227 might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
20228 budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
20229 supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
20230 office packages or desktop environments. These schools have the
20231 option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
20232 capacity to do so. Another issue is that Debian release cycles
20233 include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
20234 power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
20235 within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
20236 the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
20237 i.e. harder to understand for novices.
</p
>
20239 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
20241 <p
>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
20242 KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
20243 PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)
</p
>
20245 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20246 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
20248 <p
><ol
>
20250 <li
>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
20251 people really
"own
" their hardware, to make them understand the
20252 difference between proprietary software products, and free software
20253 developing.
</li
>
20255 <li
>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany
's public schools
20256 there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
20257 licenses), so schools won
't benefit from any savings here. This
20258 privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
20259 share among German Skolelinux schools.
</li
>
20261 <li
>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
20262 trained. In many cases, teachers
' software customs are respected by
20263 decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.
</li
>
20265 <li
>Don
't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
20266 free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
20267 general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
20268 shared world wide (school books e.g.).
</li
>
20270 <li
>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
20271 office suites is much above
20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don
't
20272 need to know the
"ribbon menu
" in order to get employed.
</li
>
20274 <li
>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.
</li
>
20276 <li
>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
20277 for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
20278 Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials. And
20279 keep sending documents in ODF formats.
</li
>
20281 </ol
></p
>
20286 <title>The cost of ODF and OOXML
</title>
20287 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html
</link>
20288 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html
</guid>
20289 <pubDate>Sat,
26 May
2012 18:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
20290 <description><p
>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
20291 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
20292 government. I just sent him an email to let him know that his
20293 assumption are most likely wrong. Sharing it here in case some of my
20294 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.
</p
>
20296 <p
><blockquote
> <p
>Hi. I just noted your
20297 <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
>
20300 <p
><blockquote
>"They
're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
20301 with the help of Google Translate I can
't find any figures about the
20302 savings of
"moving to a flexible two standard
" as claimed by the
20303 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let
's take
20304 it, and the £
500 million figure for the UK, on trust.
"
20305 </blockquote
></p
>
20307 <p
>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated. I believe it is
20308 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around
2007,
20309 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
20310 at the content. In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
20311 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
20312 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
20313 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
20314 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
20315 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver. In
20316 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
20317 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
20318 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not
20 minutes
20319 of wasted effort.
</p
>
20321 <p
>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
20322 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending
10
20323 minutes converting to ODF. :)
</p
>
20326 <a href=
"http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php
">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php
</a
>
20328 <a href=
"http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php
">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php
</a
>
20329 for background information. Norwegian only, sorry. :)
</p
>
20330 </blockquote
></p
>
20335 <title>ColorHug - USB and free software based screen color calibration
</title>
20336 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColorHug___USB_and_free_software_based_screen_color_calibration.html
</link>
20337 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColorHug___USB_and_free_software_based_screen_color_calibration.html
</guid>
20338 <pubDate>Fri,
18 May
2012 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
20339 <description><p
>In january, I
20340 <a href=
"http://blog.cihar.com/archives/
2012/
01/
17/colorhug-has-arrived/
">discovered
20341 the ColorHug
</a
>, a USB dongle from
20342 <a href=
"http://www.hughski.com/index.html
">Hughski
</a
> to calibrate
20343 the color on a computer screen. The software required is
20344 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html
">included
20345 in Debian
</a
>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
20346 batch. Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
20347 opportunity to order. Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
20348 delivery. I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
20349 should go in the mail on monday. :)
</p
>
20351 <p
>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
20352 colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
20353 drivers. :)
</p
>
20358 <title>Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner
</title>
20359 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html
</link>
20360 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html
</guid>
20361 <pubDate>Sun,
13 May
2012 20:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
20362 <description><p
>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
20363 publish another interview with the people behind
20364 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>.
20365 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
20366 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
20367 details get right before release.
20369 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
20371 <p
>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I
'm
49 years old and living in
20372 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany. I worked nearly
20 years as
20373 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
20374 international company for machinery and equipment. Since
2011 I
'm a
20375 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
20376 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer. From April this year
20377 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
20378 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.
</p
>
20380 <p
>My first contact with linux was around
1993. Since that time I used
20381 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
20382 home since
2006.
</p
>
20384 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20385 project?
</strong
></p
>
20387 <p
>Once a day in the early year of
2001 when I wanted to fetch my
20388 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
20389 middle of
20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
20390 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
20391 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
20392 computers in use. I answered:
"Yes
".
</p
>
20394 <p
>Some weeks later every of the
10 classrooms had one computer
20395 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
20396 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
20397 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
20398 and with a lot of fun. About one year later the school was connected
20399 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
20400 building. That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
20401 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
20402 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
20403 costs for things like licence and software. So I searched for a
20404 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
20405 people nearby who founded
'skolelinux.de
'. It was the Skolelinux
20406 prerelease
32 I first tried out for being used at the school. I
20407 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
20408 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
20409 Bielefeld in December of
2006.
</p
>
20411 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20412 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
20414 <p
>When I
'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
20415 for me as today.
</p
>
20417 <p
>In the past there were advantages like:
</p
>
20419 <p
><ul
>
20421 <li
>I don
't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
20422 they had little money to spent for computers and software.
</li
>
20424 <li
>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
20427 <li
>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
20428 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
20429 clients because of it
's preconfigured overall concept of being a
20430 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
20433 <li
>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
20436 </ul
></p
>
20438 <p
>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
20439 came up in this way:
</p
>
20441 <p
><ul
>
20443 <li
>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
20446 <li
>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
20447 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
20448 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.
</li
>
20450 <li
>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
20451 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
20452 interfaces used in the past.
</li
>
20454 <li
>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
20455 different needs.
</li
>
20457 <li
>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.
</li
>
20459 <li
>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
20460 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
20461 is sharing knowledge and minds.
</li
>
20463 <li
>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
20464 solved today by Debian Edu.
</li
>
20466 </ul
></p
>
20468 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20469 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
20471 <p
><ul
>
20473 <li
>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
20474 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
20475 whole municipality areas.
</li
>
20477 <li
>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
20478 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
20479 politicians.
</li
>
20481 <li
>Technically there are no disadvantages I
'm aware of.
</li
>
20483 </ul
></p
>
20485 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
20487 <p
>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
20488 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
20489 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
20490 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
20491 need from the KDE environment. On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
20492 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.
</p
>
20494 <p
>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
20495 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
20496 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
20497 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
20498 and the whole family. I probably forgot something.
</p
>
20500 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20501 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
20503 <p
>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
20504 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
20505 countries and areas all over the world.
</p
>
20510 <title>Cutting it short - and picking the right tool for the job
</title>
20511 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cutting_it_short___and_picking_the_right_tool_for_the_job.html
</link>
20512 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cutting_it_short___and_picking_the_right_tool_for_the_job.html
</guid>
20513 <pubDate>Mon,
30 Apr
2012 23:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
20514 <description><p
><!-- IMG_5869.JPG --
>
20515 <img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-
1611.jpeg
"></p
>
20517 <p
>I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
20518 common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
20519 But the last ones have not really been up to the task. My last
20520 cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
20521 time, and cutting my head took forever. And the one before that did
20522 not work very well either. We have looked for something better for a
20523 while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
20524 discovered that there are indeed better tools available. But these
20525 are not marketed and sold to
"regular consumers
". The hair saloons
20526 can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
20527 companies. The models they sell, are very different from the ones
20528 available from Elkjøp and Lefdal. The main difference is their
20529 efficiency. It would cut my hair in
5 minutes, instead of the
30-
40
20530 minutes required by my impotent Braun. The hairdresser I visited had
20531 a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
20532 producer. But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.
</p
>
20534 <p
>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it. This was not
20535 straight forward. The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
20536 did not want to sell anything to me. But searching for the model on
20537 the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
20538 around NOK
4000,-. This was a bit much. We kept searching and
20539 finally found a Danish supplier
20540 <a href=
"http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-
1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html
">selling
20541 it for around NOK
1800,-
</a
>. We ordered one, and it arrived a few
20542 days ago.
</p
>
20544 <p
>The instructions said it had to charge for
8 hours when we started
20545 to use it, so we left it charging over night. Normally it will only
20546 need one hour to charge. The following evening we successfully tested
20547 it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
20548 cutter. The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
20554 <title>HTC One X - Your video? What do you mean?
</title>
20555 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/HTC_One_X___Your_video___What_do_you_mean_.html
</link>
20556 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/HTC_One_X___Your_video___What_do_you_mean_.html
</guid>
20557 <pubDate>Thu,
26 Apr
2012 13:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
20558 <description><p
>In
<a href=
"http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece
">an
20559 article today
</a
> published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
20560 <a href=
"http://www.urke.com/eirik/
">Eirik Helland Urke
</a
> reports
20561 that the video editor application included with
20562 <a href=
"http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs
">HTC One
20563 X
</a
> have some quite surprising terms of use. The article is mostly
20564 based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:
20566 <p
><blockquote
>
20567 "<a href=
"http://twitter.com/urke/status/
194062269724897280">Drøy
20568 brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
20569 kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.
</a
>"
20570 </blockquote
></p
>
20572 <p
>I quickly translated it to this English message:
</p
>
20574 <p
><blockquote
>
20575 "Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
20576 commercially. Although I can ONLY use them privately.
"
20577 </blockquote
></p
>
20579 <p
>I
've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
20580 suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
20581 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html
">discovered
20582 with my Canon IXUS
130</a
>. The HTC One X specification specifies that
20583 the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
20585 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues
">Adaptive
20586 Multi-Rate audio codec
</a
> with patents which according to the
20587 Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
20588 <a href=
"http://www.voiceage.com/
">VoiceAge
</a
>. MP4 is
20589 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H
.264/MPEG-
4_AVC#Patent_licensing
">MPEG4 with
20590 H
.264</a
>, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
20591 with
<a href=
"http://www.mpegla.com/
">MPEG-LA
</a
>.
</p
>
20593 <p
>I know why I prefer
20594 <a href=
"http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition
">free and open
20595 standards
</a
> also for video.
</p
>
20600 <title>RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory
</title>
20601 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html
</link>
20602 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html
</guid>
20603 <pubDate>Thu,
19 Apr
2012 22:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
20604 <description><p
>Here in Norway, the
20605 <a href=
"http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=
339"> Ministry of
20606 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs
</a
> is behind
20607 a
<a href=
"http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder
">directory of
20608 standards
</a
> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
20609 government. When the directory was created, the people behind it made
20610 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
20611 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
20612 to the government. Free software and non-free software could compete
20613 on the same level.
</p
>
20615 <p
>But recently, some standards with RAND
20616 (
<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing
">Reasonable
20617 And Non-Discriminatory
</a
>) terms have made their way into the
20618 directory. And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
20619 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
20620 implementing them. The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
20621 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
20622 willing to pay will get a license. Both sound great in theory. In
20623 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
20624 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user. By
20625 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
20626 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
20627 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
20628 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
20629 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
20630 to implement a standard when the income available is zero. The result
20631 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
20632 implementing standards with RAND terms.
</p
>
20634 <p
>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
20635 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
20636 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory. Because free
20637 software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
20638 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
20639 in Norway. The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
20640 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
20641 attention to these issues in the future.
</p
>
20643 <p
>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
20645 (
<a href=
"http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/
2010/
11/rand-not-so-reasonable/
">RAND:
20646 Not So Reasonable?
</a
>).
</p
>
20648 <p
>Update
2012-
04-
21: Just came across a
20649 <a href=
"http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/
2012/
04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm
">blog
20650 post from Glyn Moody
</a
> over at Computer World UK warning about the
20651 same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government. I
20652 can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
20653 <a href=
"http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder
">the
20654 hearing taking place at the moment
</a
> (respond before
2012-
04-
27).
20655 It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
20656 specifications with RAND terms.
</p
>
20661 <title>Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt
</title>
20662 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html
</link>
20663 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html
</guid>
20664 <pubDate>Sun,
15 Apr
2012 12:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
20665 <description><p
>Behind
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and
20666 Skolelinux
</a
> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
20667 setting together all the pieces. This time I present to you Andreas
20668 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
20669 years. He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
20670 up in the recently released
20671 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze
">Debian
20672 Edu Squeeze
</a
> version.
</p
>
20674 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
20676 <p
>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany. After
20677 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
20678 Quantum Optics. After that I worked some years in an optics company.
20679 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
20680 teaching
10 to
19 years old kids at school. I teach math, physics,
20681 information technology and science/technology.
</p
>
20683 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20684 project?
</strong
></p
>
20686 <p
>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
20687 project because of my interest in education and Debian. Within the
20688 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
20689 contributing.
</p
>
20691 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20692 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
20694 <p
>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
20695 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
20696 Debian Project!
</p
>
20698 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20699 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
20701 <p
>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
20702 downside, too. In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
20703 setup, if you need or want that. Further more, it is not easily
20704 possible to upgrade the system to a new release. It takes much too
20705 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
20706 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
20707 rather small and often busy elsewhere.
</p
>
20709 <p
>The
<a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN
">Debian LAN
</a
>
20710 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.
</p
>
20712 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
20714 <p
>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
20715 on all my machines. For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
20716 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing. At school I
20717 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.
</p
>
20719 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20720 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
20722 <p
>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
20723 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
20724 politicians, this works out great for the
"market-leader
". The school
20725 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
20726 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats. Even
20727 free browsers do not work for the school administration. Publishers
20728 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.
</p
>
20730 <p
>To change this, political work is very important. Parts of the
20731 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
20732 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to
'free
'
20733 the system. There is currently some discussion about
"Open Data
" and
20734 "Free/Open Standards
". I am not sure if all the involved parties have
20735 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
20736 fraction takes them seriously. However it might slowly make free
20737 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.
</p
>
20742 <title>Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye
</title>
20743 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html
</link>
20744 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html
</guid>
20745 <pubDate>Sun,
8 Apr
2012 10:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
20746 <description><p
>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
20747 like
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>,
20748 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
20750 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze
">Debian
20751 Edu Squeeze release manual
</a
>.
20753 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
20755 <p
>I
'm a
44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
20756 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.
</p
>
20758 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20759 project?
</strong
></p
>
20761 <p
>I
'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user! The only
20762 reason my name
's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
20763 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
20764 they
'd like a native English speaker to proofread... So I did a sweep
20765 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
20766 "localisation
".
</p
>
20768 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20769 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
20771 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20772 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
20774 <p
>These questions are too hard for me - I don
't use it! In fact I
20775 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I
'd got out of the
20776 education system.
</p
>
20778 <p
>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
20779 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
20780 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
20781 money on the latest hardware.
</p
>
20783 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
20785 <p
>I
've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
20786 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
20787 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).
</p
>
20789 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20790 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
20792 <p
>Well, I don
't know. I suppose I
'd be inclined to try reasoning
20793 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
20794 you would hardly need a strategy.
</p
>
20799 <title>Why the KDE menu is slow when /usr/ is NFS mounted - and a workaround
</title>
20800 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_the_KDE_menu_is_slow_when__usr__is_NFS_mounted___and_a_workaround.html
</link>
20801 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_the_KDE_menu_is_slow_when__usr__is_NFS_mounted___and_a_workaround.html
</guid>
20802 <pubDate>Fri,
6 Apr
2012 22:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
20803 <description><p
>Recently I have spent time with
20804 <a href=
"http://www.slxdrift.no/
">Skolelinux Drift AS
</a
> on speeding
20805 up a
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>
20806 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
20807 process I discovered something very surprising. The reason the KDE
20808 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
20809 due to the way KDE find application icons. I discovered that showing
20810 the Multimedia menu would cause more than
20 000 IP packages to be
20811 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server. Most of these were
20813 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response. Because the
20814 ping times between the client and the server were in the range
2-
20
20815 ms, the menus would be very slow. Looking at the strace of kicker in
20816 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
20817 the source of these NFS calls are access(
2) system calls for
20818 non-existing files. KDE can do hundreds of access(
2) calls to find
20819 one icon file. In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
20820 around
230 access(
2) calls.
</p
>
20822 <p
>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
20823 directories, and the list of possible directories is large. In
20824 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
20825 and .xpm. The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
20826 mounted. Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
20827 requests. I am not the first one to discover this. I found a
20828 <a href=
"https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=
211416">KDE bug report
20829 from
2009</a
> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.
</p
>
20831 <p
>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
20832 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
20833 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
20834 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
20835 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/. Finally, I add symlinks to
20836 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
20837 for them. This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
20838 one icon from several hundred to less than
5, and make the KDE menu
20839 almost instantaneous. I
'm not quite sure where to make the package
20840 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.
</p
>
20842 <p
>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
20843 and icon handling, but also the login process. Not quite sure how to
20844 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
20845 that is not really an option at the moment.
</p
>
20847 <p
>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
20848 (at) lists.debian.org.
</p
>
20850 <p
>Update
2015-
08-
04: The
20851 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-edu/upstream/kde-icon-cache.git/
">source
20852 of the scripts and associated Debian package
</a
> is available from the
20853 Debian Edu github repository.
</p
>
20858 <title>Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News
</title>
20859 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html
</link>
20860 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html
</guid>
20861 <pubDate>Thu,
5 Apr
2012 08:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
20862 <description><p
>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
20863 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
> by
20864 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News. The result was made public for
20865 non-subscribers today. I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
20866 for schools. Check out his article
20867 <a href=
"https://lwn.net/Articles/
488805/
">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
20868 distribution for education
</a
> if you want to learn more.
</p
>
20873 <title>Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer
</title>
20874 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html
</link>
20875 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html
</guid>
20876 <pubDate>Sun,
1 Apr
2012 23:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
20877 <description><p
>Germany is a core area for the
20878 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>
20879 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
20880 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
20882 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
20884 <p
>I
've studied Mathematics at the university
'Ruhr-Universität
' in
20885 Bochum, Germany. Since
1981 I
'm working as a teacher at the school
20886 "<a href=
"http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/
">Westfalen-Kolleg
20887 Dortmund
</a
>", a second chance school. Here, young adults is given
20888 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
20889 examination
'Abitur
', which will allow to study at a university. This
20890 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
20891 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.
</p
>
20893 <p
>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
20894 blended learning project called
'abitur-online.nrw
' and in some other
20895 information technology related projects. For about ten years I
've been
20896 teacher and coordinator for the
'abitur-online
' project at my
20897 school. Being now in my early sixties, I
've decided to leave school at
20898 the end of April this year.
</p
>
20900 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20901 project?
</strong
></p
>
20903 <p
>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
20904 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
20905 Project). At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of
1997
20906 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
20907 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
20908 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
20909 reach. At home I
'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
20910 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
20911 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
20912 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
20913 Skolelinux.
</p
>
20915 <p
>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
20916 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
20917 clients. The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
20918 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
20919 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
20920 the admin teachers.
</p
>
20922 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20923 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
20925 <p
>It
's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it
's
20926 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
20927 So it was a perfect choice.
</p
>
20929 <p
>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it
's
20930 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
20931 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp. It
's of
20932 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
20933 a school and to choose where to get support for this.
</p
>
20935 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20936 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
20938 <p
>Nothing yet.
</p
>
20940 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
20942 <p
>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
20943 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
20944 Annotator). At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
20945 LibreOffice.
</p
>
20947 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20948 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
20950 <p
>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
20951 that doesn
't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
20952 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.
</p
>
20957 <title>Debian Edu screencast: Checking email with kmail using Kerberos authentication
</title>
20958 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Checking_email_with_kmail_using_Kerberos_authentication.html
</link>
20959 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Checking_email_with_kmail_using_Kerberos_authentication.html
</guid>
20960 <pubDate>Sun,
25 Mar
2012 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
20961 <description><!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html --
>
20963 <p
>The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
20964 published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
20965 to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
20966 allowing users to check their local email account without providing
20967 any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
20968 and also available from
<a href=
"https://vimeo.com/
38601767">vimeo
</a
>
20970 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/
2012-
03-
14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv
">Ogg
20971 Theora
</a
> file. Check it out below.
</p
>
20973 <p
><video id=
"kmail-kerberos-movie
" width=
"256" height=
"184" preload controls
>
20974 <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
"' /
>
20975 <p
>Download video as
20976 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/
2012-
03-
14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv
">Ogg
</a
>.
</p
>
20977 </video
></p
>
20982 <title>Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby
</title>
20983 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html
</link>
20984 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html
</guid>
20985 <pubDate>Mon,
19 Mar
2012 21:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
20986 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>
20987 users are spread all across the globe. The second inteview after
20988 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
03/msg00001.html
">the
20989 Squeeze release
</a
> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
20990 long time Linux user in United Kingdom.
</p
>
20992 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
20994 <p
>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
20995 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
20996 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
20997 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
20998 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
20999 years ago we had about
50 schools interested in some way, but we
21000 weren
't able to convert many of them into sustainable
21001 installations.
</p
>
21003 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
21004 project?
</strong
></p
>
21006 <p
>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
21007 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
21008 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP
4 and GNOME. When LTSP
5 came
21009 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
21010 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
21011 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
21012 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
21013 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
21014 these things we decided to try it.
</p
>
21016 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21017 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
21019 <p
>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
21020 from that I have always believed in the same
"sustainable computing
"
21021 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
21022 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
21023 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
21024 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about
25
21025 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
21026 proprietary software everywhere.
</p
>
21028 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21029 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
21031 <p
>As a newcomer I
'm just finding out who
's who in the community and
21032 how you
're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
21033 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
21034 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
21035 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!
</p
>
21037 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
21039 <p
>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
21040 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
21041 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
21042 use Ubuntu and an Android
4 eePad Transformer (but I
'm not sure if
21043 that counts...)
</p
>
21045 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
21046 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
21048 <p
>That
's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
21049 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
21050 the notion of
"computer
" means simply
"proprietary office
21051 applications
". However, schools today are experiencing budget
21052 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
21053 XP. At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
21054 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
21055 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
21056 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they
're
21057 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it
's encouraging that the
21058 first
10,
000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in
2 hours.
</p
>
21060 <p
>I don
't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
21061 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
21062 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.
</p
>
21067 <title>Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu
</title>
21068 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html
</link>
21069 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html
</guid>
21070 <pubDate>Fri,
16 Mar
2012 09:
55:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21071 <description><p
>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
21072 it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
21073 translated versions in sync. To do this we have come up with what we
21074 believe is a very efficient work flow.
</p
>
21078 <li
>The documentation is written in a
21079 <a href=
"http://moinmo.in
">moinmoin wiki
</a
> (see for example
21080 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze
">the
21081 Squeeze release manual
</a
>) with support for exporting the content as
21082 docbook XML.
</li
>
21084 <li
>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
21085 .pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
21086 with the translated text.
</li
>
21088 <li
>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
21089 which part of the original wiki document is new or changed. They can
21090 use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
21091 the translation. There is even a system in place to handle translated
21094 <li
>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
21095 XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.
</li
>
21097 <li
>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
21098 create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.
</li
>
21102 <p
>This setup work very well, but have a few issues. The biggest
21103 issue is that
<a href=
"http://moinmo.in/DocBook
">the docbook support
21104 we use in moinmoin
</a
> is not actively maintained. The docbook
21105 support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
21106 make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.
</p
>
21108 <p
>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
21109 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc
">debian-edu-doc
21110 package
</a
>.
</p
>
21115 <title>Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!
</title>
21116 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html
</link>
21117 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html
</guid>
21118 <pubDate>Sun,
11 Mar
2012 23:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21119 <description><p
>This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
21120 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux / Debian Edu
</a
> based
21121 on Debian/Squeeze. The full announcement is
21122 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
03/msg00001.html
">available
</a
>
21123 from the project announcement list. Now is a good time to test if it
21124 you have not done so already.
</p
>
21126 <p
>I plan to present the new version at
21127 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20120313-skolelinux/
">a NUUG
21128 meeting
</a
> on tuesday. I look forward to seeing you there if you are
21129 in Oslo, Norway.
</p
>
21134 <title>Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker
</title>
21135 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html
</link>
21136 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html
</guid>
21137 <pubDate>Fri,
9 Mar
2012 11:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21138 <description><p
>Inspired by
<a href=
"http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/
">the
21139 interview series
</a
> conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
21140 interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
21141 community. This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
21142 more international audience.
</p
>
21144 <p
>While
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and
21145 Skolelinux
</a
> originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
21146 Europe, there are users all around the globe. One of those far away
21147 from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
21148 and contributor. It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
21149 work out of the box in Japan. I got him to answer a few questions,
21150 and am happy to share the response with you. :)
21153 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
21155 <p
>My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
21156 and we have three lovely children, aged
15,
14 and
4(!) I am the IT
21157 Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
21158 teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
21159 Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
21160 I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
21161 primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
21162 so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
21163 also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
21164 to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
21165 appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.
</p
>
21167 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
21168 project?
</strong
></p
>
21170 <p
>In around
2004 or
5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
21171 server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
21172 samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
21173 Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn
't really improve my setup. I
21174 did various desperate searches for things like
"school Linux server
"
21175 and ended up in a document called
"Drift
" something or other. Reading
21176 there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
21177 problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
21178 previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
21179 Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
21180 downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
21181 Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
21182 my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.
</p
>
21184 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21185 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
21187 <p
>For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
21188 workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
21189 ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
21190 designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
21191 doesn
't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
21192 school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
21195 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21196 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
21198 <p
>The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
21199 have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
21200 make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
21201 who don
't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
21202 important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
21203 instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
21204 default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
21205 kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
21206 Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is. A
21207 second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
21208 customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
21209 multiplies. For example, backup wasn
't working properly in Lenny. It
21210 took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
21211 I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
21214 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
21216 <p
>Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
21217 studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
21218 (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
21219 still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
21220 house, that
's very useful for the family photos and music. At school
21221 the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
21222 have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
21223 day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
21224 installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS. We also
21225 have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
21226 and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.
</p
>
21228 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
21229 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
21231 <p
>Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
21232 and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
21233 popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
21234 to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
21235 file formats and Word than they did
5 years ago. The Edu aspect is
21236 also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
21237 Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu? But of course the main attraction is
21238 budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
21239 compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
21240 is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
21241 are not impressed when their USB drive doesn
't work, or their browser
21242 doesn
't play flash, for example.
</p
>
21247 <title>Debian Edu screencast: Mass creation of user accounts in Squeeze
</title>
21248 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Mass_creation_of_user_accounts_in_Squeeze.html
</link>
21249 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Mass_creation_of_user_accounts_in_Squeeze.html
</guid>
21250 <pubDate>Wed,
7 Mar
2012 13:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21251 <description><!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html --
>
21253 <p
>One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
21254 screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
21255 Debian Edu Squeeze. The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
21256 also available from
<a href=
"http://vimeo.com/
37675399">vimeo
</a
> and
21258 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/
2012-
02-
29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv
">Ogg
21259 Theora
</a
> file. Check it out below.
</p
>
21261 <p
><video id=
"gosa-mass-user-create-movie
" width=
"256" height=
"184" preload controls
>
21262 <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
"' /
>
21263 <p
>Download video as
21264 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/
2012-
02-
29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv
">Ogg
</a
>.
</p
>
21265 </video
></p
>
21270 <title>Third release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze
</title>
21271 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</link>
21272 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</guid>
21273 <pubDate>Sun,
4 Mar
2012 18:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21274 <description><p
>This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
21275 candidate for
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
21276 Skolelinux
</a
> based on Squeeze. The full announcement is
21277 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
03/msg00000.html
">available
</a
>
21278 from the project announcement list. Check it out if you
21279 need a software solution for your school.
</p
>
21284 <title>Stopmotion for making stop motion animations on Linux - reloaded
</title>
21285 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Stopmotion_for_making_stop_motion_animations_on_Linux___reloaded.html
</link>
21286 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Stopmotion_for_making_stop_motion_animations_on_Linux___reloaded.html
</guid>
21287 <pubDate>Sat,
3 Mar
2012 12:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21288 <description><p
>Many years ago, the
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux
21289 / Debian Edu project
</a
> initiated a student project to create a tool
21290 for making stop motion movies. The proposal came from a teacher
21291 needing such tool on Skolelinux. The project, called
"stopmotion
",
21292 was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
21293 national aware with this great project. The project was initiated and
21294 mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
21295 and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad. They got in touch with people at Aardman
21296 Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
21297 such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
21298 animators around the globe. But as is usual after studying, both got
21299 jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
21300 project, and it has been lingering for a few years now. Until last
21303 <p
>Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
21304 project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
21306 <a href=
"http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/
">linuxstopmotion
</a
>.
21307 The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
21308 Internet search engines (try to search for
'stopmotion
' to see what I
21309 mean). I
've been following
21310 <a href=
"https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community
">the
21311 mailing list
</a
> and the improvement already in place and planned for
21312 the future is encouraging. If you want to make stop motion movies.
21313 Check it out. :)
</p
>
21318 <title>Second release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze
</title>
21319 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</link>
21320 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</guid>
21321 <pubDate>Mon,
27 Feb
2012 14:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21322 <description><p
>This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
21323 candidate for
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
21324 Skolelinux
</a
> based on Squeeze. The full announcement did for some
21325 reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
21326 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/
2012/
02/msg00015.html
">available
</a
>
21327 from the Debian development announcement list. Check it out if you
21328 need a software solution for your school.
</p
>
21333 <title>First release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze
</title>
21334 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</link>
21335 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</guid>
21336 <pubDate>Sun,
19 Feb
2012 23:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21337 <description><p
>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
21338 wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
21339 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> based
21340 on Squeeze. The full announcement is
21341 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
02/msg00001.html
">available
</a
>
21342 on the project announcement list. Check it out if you need a software
21343 solution for your school.
</p
>
21348 <title>How to figure out which RAID disk to replace when it fail
</title>
21349 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_figure_out_which_RAID_disk_to_replace_when_it_fail.html
</link>
21350 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_figure_out_which_RAID_disk_to_replace_when_it_fail.html
</guid>
21351 <pubDate>Tue,
14 Feb
2012 21:
25:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21352 <description><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
>
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
>
21368 <blockquote
><pre
>
21369 for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep
'(F)
'|tr
' ' "\n
"|grep
'(F)
'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
21371 printf
"Failed disk $d:
"
21372 hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep
'Serial Num
'
21374 </blockquote
></pre
>
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
>
21379 <p
>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(
</p
>
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
>
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
>
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
>
21406 <title>Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</title>
21407 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html
</link>
21408 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html
</guid>
21409 <pubDate>Mon,
13 Feb
2012 23:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21410 <description><p
>New in the Squeeze version of
21411 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> is the
21412 ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
21413 based on their environment. We want all systems on the client to use
21414 the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from
<tt
>http://wpad/wpad.dat
</tt
>, to
21415 allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
21416 sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings. The schools can
21417 change the global proxy setting by editing
21418 <tt
>tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat
</tt
> and the change propagate
21419 to all Debian Edu clients in the network.
</p
>
21421 <p
>The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
21422 In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
21423 simple one, they can run arbitrary code):
</p
>
21425 <blockquote
><pre
>
21426 function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
21428 if (!isResolvable(host) ||
21429 isPlainHostName(host) ||
21430 dnsDomainIs(host,
".intern
"))
21431 return
"DIRECT
";
21433 return
"PROXY webcache:
3128; DIRECT
";
21435 </pre
></blockquote
>
21437 <p
>to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:
</p
>
21439 <blockquote
><pre
>
21440 http_proxy=http://webcache:
3128/
21441 ftp_proxy=http://webcache:
3128/
21442 </pre
></blockquote
>
21444 <p
>To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
21445 the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
21447 <tt
><a href=
"http://www.debian.org/
">http://www.debian.org/
</a
></tt
>,
21448 and insert this extracted proxy URL in
<tt
>/etc/environment
</tt
> and
21449 <tt
>/etc/apt/apt.conf
</tt
>. The perl script wpad-extract work just
21450 fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
21451 javascript code is
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
631045">no longer
21452 able to build
</a
> because the C library it depended on is now a C++
21453 library. I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
21454 is frozen. An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
21455 use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
21456 known alternative is known at the moment.
</p
>
21458 <p
>This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
21459 laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
21460 is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
21461 automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
21462 feature when it is connected to other networks. And if no proxy is
21463 announced, direct connections will be used instead.
</p
>
21465 <p
>Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
21466 or security problem. But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
21467 could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
21468 and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
21469 distinction to be academic. If you are afraid of using the wrong
21470 proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
21471 first place. In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
21472 ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
21473 the network setup changes.
</p
>
21475 <p
>The WPAD system is documented in a
21476 <a href=
"http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-
01">IETF
21477 draft
</a
> and a
21478 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol
">Wikipedia
21479 page
</a
> for those that want to learn more.
</p
>
21484 <title>Saving power with Debian Edu / Skolelinux using shutdown-at-night
</title>
21485 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Saving_power_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_using_shutdown_at_night.html
</link>
21486 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Saving_power_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_using_shutdown_at_night.html
</guid>
21487 <pubDate>Sun,
5 Feb
2012 09:
45:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21488 <description><p
>Since the Lenny version of
21489 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>, a
21490 feature to save power have been included. It is as simple as it is
21491 practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
21492 in the morning. This is done using the
21493 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html
">shutdown-at-night
</a
> Debian package.
</p
>
21495 <p
>To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
21496 the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts. For Debian Edu, this is done in
21497 LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
21498 every hour from
16:
00 until
06:
00 to see if the machine is unused, and
21499 shut it down if it is. If the hardware in question is supported by
21501 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html
">nvram-wakeup
</a
>
21502 package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around
07:
00 +-
21503 10 minutes. If this isn
't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
21504 try to turn on the client. The wake-on-lan option is only documented
21505 and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.
</p
>
21507 <p
>It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
21508 blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
21509 the common setup for a classroom. The nvram-wakeup method only work
21510 for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock. I
've seen old
21511 machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
21512 starting from
0 (or was it
1990?) every boot. If you have one of
21513 those, you have to turn on the computer manually.
</p
>
21515 <p
>The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
21516 also be used outside the Debian Edu environment. For those without a
21517 central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
21518 <tt
>/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night
</tt
> to enable it.
21519 Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?
</p
>
21524 <title>Third beta version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze
</title>
21525 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</link>
21526 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</guid>
21527 <pubDate>Sat,
4 Feb
2012 13:
25:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21528 <description><p
>I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
21529 publish the third beta version of
21530 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> based
21531 on Squeeze. If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
21532 out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
21533 installing new machines, check it out. If you need a software
21534 solution for your school, check it out too. The full announcement is
21535 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
02/msg00000.html
">available
</a
>
21536 on the project announcement list.
</p
>
21538 <p
>I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
21539 beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):
</p
>
21543 <li
>It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
21544 10.0.0.0/
8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
21545 the installation.
</li
>
21547 <li
>Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
21548 Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.
</li
>
21550 <li
>The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
21551 disabled queues are restarted every hour. This should cut down on
21552 the amount of manual administration needed for printers.
</li
>
21554 <li
>The set of initial users have been changed. Now a personal user
21555 for the local system administrator is created during installation
21556 instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
21557 and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
21558 membership. This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
21559 up to date on the system.
</li
>
21563 <p
>The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
21564 private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home. I will use it look
21565 for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
21566 final Squeeze release is published.
</p
>
21568 <p
>Next weekend the project organise a
21569 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
01/msg00001.html
">developer
21570 gathering
</a
> in Oslo. We will continue the work on the Squeeze
21571 version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version. Perhaps I
21572 will see you there?
</p
>
21577 <title>Handling non-free firmware in Debian Edu/Squeeze
</title>
21578 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Handling_non_free_firmware_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html
</link>
21579 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Handling_non_free_firmware_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html
</guid>
21580 <pubDate>Fri,
27 Jan
2012 23:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21581 <description><p
>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
21582 This is the sad fact of todays computers. In the next version of
21583 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> based
21584 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
21585 firmware blobs easier to handle. The common use case I run into is a
21586 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
21587 work, but there are other use cases as well.
</p
>
21589 <p
>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
21590 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
21591 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
21592 during installation. This take care firmware for network devices used
21593 by the installer when installing from from local media. But for
21594 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
21595 not taken care of by this.
</p
>
21597 <p
>For non-network devices, we provide the script
21598 <tt
>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware
</tt
> which
21599 search through the
<tt
>dmesg
</tt
> output for drivers requesting extra
21600 firmware. The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
21601 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
21602 the requested firmware file(s) is installed. I have proposed to do
21603 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
21604 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
655507">#
655507</a
>), to allow PXE
21605 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better. Run the
21606 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
21607 firmware packages.
</p
>
21609 <p
>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
21610 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
21611 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
21612 included to be able to install at all. To fill the PXE installation
21613 initrd with extra firmware, the
21614 <tt
>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware
</tt
> script is
21615 provided. Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
21616 PXE initrd with firmware packages.
</p
>
21618 <p
>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
21619 network cards working. For this,
21620 <tt
>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware
</tt
> is
21621 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs. It is used
21622 the same way as the other firmware related tools.
</p
>
21624 <p
>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation. We
21625 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
21626 non-free software, and it is their choice.
</p
>
21628 <p
>We plan to release beta3 this weekend. You might want to give it a
21634 <title>Setting up a new school with Debian Edu/Squeeze
</title>
21635 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Setting_up_a_new_school_with_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html
</link>
21636 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Setting_up_a_new_school_with_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html
</guid>
21637 <pubDate>Wed,
25 Jan
2012 21:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21638 <description><p
>The next version of
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu
21639 / Skolelinux
</a
> will include a new tool
21640 <tt
>sitesummary2ldapdhcp
</tt
>, which can be used to quickly set up all
21641 the computers in a school without much manual labour. Here is a short
21642 summary on how to use it to set up a new school.
</p
>
21644 <p
>First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
21645 central server in the network. Next, PXE boot all the client machines
21646 as thin clients and wait
5 minutes after the last client booted to
21647 allow the clients to report their existence to the central server. When
21648 this is done, log on to the central server and run
21649 <tt
>sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
</tt
> in the
<tt
>konsole
</tt
> to use the
21650 collected information to generate system objects in LDAP. The output
21651 will look similar to this:
</p
>
21653 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
21654 % sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
21655 info: Updating machine tjener.intern [
10.0.2.2] id ether-
00:
01:
02:
03:
04:
05.
21656 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.
21658 Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.
21660 Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
21661 enter password: *******
21663 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
21665 <p
>After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
21666 root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
21667 populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
21668 automatically generated names. The final step to set up the school is
21669 then to log into
<a href=
"https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/
">GOsa
</a
>,
21670 the web based user, group and system administration system to change
21671 system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
21672 enable DHCP and DNS for the systems. All clients that should be used
21673 as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
21674 group. After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
21675 and get their assigned names and group based configuration
21676 automatically.
</p
>
21678 <p
>We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
21679 enabled this weekend. You might want to give it a try.
</p
>
21681 <p
>Update
2012-
01-
28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
21682 hosts, one need to add the option -a. I forgot to mention this in my
21683 original text, and have added it to the text now.
</p
>
21688 <title>Changing the default Iceweasel start page in Debian Edu/Squeeze
</title>
21689 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Changing_the_default_Iceweasel_start_page_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html
</link>
21690 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Changing_the_default_Iceweasel_start_page_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html
</guid>
21691 <pubDate>Tue,
10 Jan
2012 15:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21692 <description><p
>In the Squeeze version of
21693 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> soon
21694 to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
21695 start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
21696 all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP. In
21697 addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
21698 are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
21699 first time.
</p
>
21701 <p
>The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
21702 labeledURI with
"http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux
" as the
21703 default content. By changing this value to another URL, all users get
21704 to see the page behind this new URL.
</p
>
21706 <p
>An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool. It can be
21707 called as
"<tt
>ldapvi -ZD
'(cn=admin)
'</tt
>' to update LDAP with the
21708 new setting.
</p
>
21710 <p
>We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
21711 the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
21712 from within Iceweasel instead.
</p
>
21717 <title>Second beta version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze
</title>
21718 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</link>
21719 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</guid>
21720 <pubDate>Sat,
7 Jan
2012 22:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21721 <description><p
>I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
21722 the second beta version of
21723 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>. If
21724 you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
21725 configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
21726 machines, check it out. If you need a software solution for your
21727 school, check it out too. The full announcement is
21728 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
01/msg00000.html
">available
</a
>
21729 on the project announcement list.
</p
>
21734 <title>Fixing an hanging debian installer for Debian Edu
</title>
21735 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_an_hanging_debian_installer_for_Debian_Edu.html
</link>
21736 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_an_hanging_debian_installer_for_Debian_Edu.html
</guid>
21737 <pubDate>Tue,
3 Jan
2012 11:
25:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21738 <description><p
>During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
21739 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> ready
21740 for release. The initial problem I looked at was particularly
21741 interesting.
</p
>
21743 <P
>The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
21744 post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
21745 the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
21746 integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
21747 scratch. I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
21748 remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
21749 wrap up its tasks.
</p
>
21751 <p
>Eventually the cause was found. The kernel was simply running out
21752 of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
21753 Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
21754 to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
21755 because I was typing.
</P
>
21757 <p
>The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
21758 the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
21759 /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
21760 installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do
'find /
' to
21761 generate some disk IO. Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
21762 one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
21763 generate entropy.
</p
>
21765 <p
>The fix is in
21766 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation
">beta1
21767 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze
</a
> version, and we
21768 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu
">welcome more testers and
21769 developers
</a
>. We plan to release beta2 this weekend.
</p
>
21774 <title>Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge
</title>
21775 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html
</link>
21776 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html
</guid>
21777 <pubDate>Mon,
21 Nov
2011 12:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21778 <description><p
>At work we have heaps of servers. I believe the total count is
21779 around
1000 at the moment. To be able to get help from the vendors
21780 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
21781 up to date. If the firmware isn
't the latest and greatest, the
21782 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
21783 firmware is upgraded. So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
21784 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
21785 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
21786 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
21787 the tools to do so.
</p
>
21789 <p
>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
21790 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got. Most of
21791 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
21792 so far. This blog post is about the Dell part.
</P
>
21794 <p
>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
21795 <a href=
"ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz
">an XML file
</a
>
21796 with firmware information for all
11th generation servers, listing
21797 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
21798 site I can find it. Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
21799 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
21800 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
21801 be activated on the first reboot.
</p
>
21803 <p
>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
21804 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
21805 servers at a site? Please get in touch and lets share resources.
</p
>
21807 <p
><pre
>
21811 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
21813 # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
21814 my %rhelmodules = (
21815 'XML::Simple
' =
> 'perl-XML-Simple
',
21817 for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
21818 eval
"use $module;
";
21820 my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
21821 system(
"yum install -y $pkg
");
21822 eval
"use $module;
";
21826 my $errorsto =
'pere@hungry.com
';
21832 sub run_firmware_script {
21833 my ($opts, $script) = @_;
21835 print STDERR
"fail: missing script name\n
";
21838 print STDERR
"Running $script\n\n
";
21840 if (
0 == system(
"sh $script $opts
")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
21841 print STDERR
"success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n
";
21843 print STDERR
"fail: firmware script returned error\n
";
21847 sub run_firmware_scripts {
21848 my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
21849 # Run firmware packages
21850 for my $dir (@dirs) {
21851 print STDERR
"info: Running scripts in $dir\n
";
21852 opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die
"Unable to open directory $dir: $!
";
21853 while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
21854 next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
21855 run_firmware_script($opts,
"$dir/$s
");
21863 print STDERR
"info: Downloading $url\n
";
21864 system(
"wget --quiet \
"$url\
"");
21869 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
21872 if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
21874 # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
21875 system(
'yum install -y compat-libstdc++-
33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail
');
21877 my $tmpdir = tempdir(
21881 fetch_dell_fw(
'catalog/Catalog.xml.gz
');
21882 system(
'gunzip Catalog.xml.gz
');
21883 my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list(
'Catalog.xml
');
21884 # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
21885 my $fwopts =
"-q
";
21887 for my $url (@paths) {
21888 fetch_dell_fw($url);
21890 run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
21892 print STDERR
"error: Unsupported Dell model
'$product
'.\n
";
21893 print STDERR
"error: Please report to $errorsto.\n
";
21895 chdir(
'/
');
21897 print STDERR
"error: Unsupported Dell model
'$product
'.\n
";
21898 print STDERR
"error: Please report to $errorsto.\n
";
21902 sub fetch_dell_fw {
21904 my $url =
"ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path
";
21908 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
21909 # firmware packages to download from Dell. Only work for Linux
21910 # machines and
11th generation Dell servers.
21911 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
21912 my $filename = shift;
21914 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
21916 my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
21918 print STDERR
"Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n
";
21920 my $xml = XMLin($filename);
21922 for my $bundle (@{$xml-
>{SoftwareBundle}}) {
21923 my $brand = $bundle-
>{TargetSystems}-
>{Brand}-
>{Display}-
>{content};
21924 my $model = $bundle-
>{TargetSystems}-
>{Brand}-
>{Model}-
>{Display}-
>{content};
21926 if (
"ARRAY
" eq ref $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}) {
21927 $oscode = $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}[
0]-
>{osCode};
21929 $oscode = $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}-
>{osCode};
21931 if ($mybrand eq $brand
&& $mymodel eq $model
&& "LIN
" eq $oscode)
21933 @paths = map { $_-
>{path} } @{$bundle-
>{Contents}-
>{Package}};
21936 for my $component (@{$xml-
>{SoftwareComponent}}) {
21937 my $componenttype = $component-
>{ComponentType}-
>{value};
21939 # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
21940 next if
'APAC
' eq $componenttype;
21942 my $cpath = $component-
>{path};
21943 for my $path (@paths) {
21944 if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
21945 push(@paths, $cpath);
21953 <p
>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
21954 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking. Anyone know a
21955 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers? At the
21956 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
21957 outdated.
</p
>
21962 <title>Free e-book kiosk for the public libraries?
</title>
21963 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_e_book_kiosk_for_the_public_libraries_.html
</link>
21964 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_e_book_kiosk_for_the_public_libraries_.html
</guid>
21965 <pubDate>Fri,
7 Oct
2011 19:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
21966 <description><p
>Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
21967 publishing houses how to handle electronic books. Surprisingly, the
21968 libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
21969 (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
21970 publishing houses. Time limited renting (
2-
3 years) is one proposed
21971 model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
21972 Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
21975 <p
>Anyway, while reading
<a href=
"http://boklaben.no/?p=
220">part of
21976 this debate
</a
>, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
21977 sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
21978 to a better model. The idea is simple:
</p
>
21980 <p
>Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
21981 Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
21982 solution to hand out free e-books. As a start, the books distributed
21983 by
<a href=
"http://www.gutenberg.org/
">Project Gutenberg
</a
> (about
21984 36,
000 books),
<a href=
"http://runeberg.org/
">Project Runenberg
</a
>
21985 (
1149 books) and
<a href=
"http://www.archive.org/details/texts
">The
21986 Internet Archive
</a
> (
3,
033,
748 books) could be included, but any book
21987 where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
21988 distributed.
</p
>
21990 <p
>The computer system would make it easy to:
</p
>
21994 <li
>Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
21995 other relevant equipment.
</li
>
21997 <li
>Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.
</li
>
22001 <p
>In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
22002 site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
22003 visiting the library. The site would be the distribution point for
22004 the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
22005 books available.
</p
>
22007 <p
>Are there anyone working on a system like this? I guess it would
22008 fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
22009 libraries. :)
</p
>
22014 <title>Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage
</title>
22015 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html
</link>
22016 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html
</guid>
22017 <pubDate>Sat,
17 Sep
2011 20:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
22018 <description><p
>For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
22019 server. It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
22020 movie collection easily available. It also make it possible to let
22021 the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
22022 down. I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
22023 subtitle options intact. It also ensure that the entire film is one
22024 file on the disk. As this is for personal use, the ripping is
22025 perfectly legal here in Norway.
</p
>
22027 <p
>Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:
</p
>
22029 <blockquote
><pre
>
22031 # apt-get install lsdvd
22032 title=$(lsdvd
2>/dev/null|awk
'/Disc Title: / {print $
3}
')
22033 dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=
1M
22034 </pre
></blockquote
>
22036 <p
>But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
22037 been looking for a better alternative. I have no idea why this I/O
22038 error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
22039 something fishy with the DVDs in question. Or perhaps all three.
</p
>
22041 <p
>Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
22042 genisoimage. This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
22043 movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
22046 <blockquote
><pre
>
22048 # apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
22050 tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
22051 title=$(lsdvd
2>/dev/null|awk
'/Disc Title: / {print $
3}
')
22052 dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
22053 genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
22054 rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
22055 </pre
></blockquote
>
22057 <p
>Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?
</p
>
22059 <p
>Update
2011-
09-
18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
22060 readom program from the wodim package. It is specially written to
22061 read optical media, and is called like this:
<tt
>readom dev=/dev/dvd
22062 f=image.iso
</tt
>. It got
6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
22063 before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.
</p
>
22065 <p
>Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
22066 <a href=
"http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo
">his
22067 program python-dvdvideo
</a
>, which seem to be just what I am looking
22068 for. Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
22069 creating a ISO image. The git source built and installed just fine in
22070 Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.
</p
>
22075 <title>How is booting into runlevel
1 different from single user boots?
</title>
22076 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html
</link>
22077 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html
</guid>
22078 <pubDate>Thu,
4 Aug
2011 12:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
22079 <description><p
>Wouter Verhelst have some
22080 <a href=
"http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot
">interesting
22081 comments and opinions
</a
> on my blog post on
22082 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html
">the
22083 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian
</a
> and my blog post about
22084 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html
">the
22085 default KDE desktop in Debian
</a
>. I only have time to address one
22086 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
22087 misunderstanding he bring forward:
</p
>
22089 <p
><blockquote
>
22090 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
22091 single-user system (by adding
'single
' to the kernel command line;
22092 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
22093 </blockquote
></p
>
22095 <p
>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
22096 and booting into runlevel
1 is the same. I am not surprised he
22097 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
22098 thing to believe. But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
22099 runlevel
1 do not work properly and it isn
't the same as single user
22100 mode. I
'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
22101 hard to explain.
</p
>
22103 <p
>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
22104 "<tt
>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin
</tt
>". This means the only thing that is
22105 executed in single user mode is sulogin. Single user mode is a boot
22106 state
"between
" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
22107 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
22108 enters the single user state. When switching to runlevel
1, the state
22109 is in fact not ending in runlevel
1, but it passes through runlevel
1
22110 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
22111 runs
"init -t1 S
" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
22112 1. It is confusing that the
'S
' (single user) init mode is not the
22113 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
22116 <p
>This summary might make it clearer. When booting for the first
22117 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
22118 "<tt
>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin
</tt
>". When booting into
22119 runlevel
1, the following commands are executed:
"<tt
>/etc/init.d/rc
22120 S; /etc/init.d/rc
1; /sbin/sulogin
</tt
>". A problem show up when
22121 trying to continue after visiting single user mode. Not all services
22122 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
22123 unpredicatble state. This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
22124 after visiting single user mode.
</p
>
22126 <p
>A similar problem with runlevel
1 is caused by the amount of
22127 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/. When switching from say runlevel
2
22128 to runlevel
1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
22129 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
22130 started again when switching away from runlevel
1 to the runlevels
22131 2-
5. I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
22132 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not
<strong
>required
</strong
> to get a
22133 functioning single user mode during boot.
</p
>
22135 <p
>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
22136 and discovered this problem a few years ago. I suspect it originates
22137 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.
</p
>
22142 <title>What should start from /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian? - almost nothing
</title>
22143 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html
</link>
22144 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html
</guid>
22145 <pubDate>Sat,
30 Jul
2011 14:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
22146 <description><p
>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
22147 are started from /etc/rcS.d/. In fact, there is a bite more of them
22148 than make sense, and this causes a few problems. What kind of
22149 problems, you might ask. There are at least two problems. The first
22150 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
22151 runlevel
1. One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
22152 the expected state. The other is that single user boot will sometimes
22153 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
22154 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
22155 machine from a problem in that subsystem. A minor additional point is
22156 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
22157 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
22158 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.
</p
>
22160 <p
>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/. In short, only the
22161 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
22162 presented during a single user boot should go there. Everything else
22163 should go into the numeric runlevels. This means things like
22164 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
22165 the numeric runlevels. Today in Debian, there are around
115 init.d
22166 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
22167 out. Do your package have one of them? Please help us make single
22168 user and runlevel
1 better by moving it.
</p
>
22170 <p
>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
22171 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
22172 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
22173 is presented.
</p
>
22175 <p
>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound. To keep
22176 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
22177 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
22178 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
22179 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
22180 moved first. This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
22181 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
22182 the system state correct. This will require some coordination when it
22183 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
22184 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
22185 on them. Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
22186 package, while others are still left to do. I wish I had time to work
22187 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
22188 find time to push this forward.
</p
>
22193 <title>What is missing in the Debian desktop, or why my parents use Kubuntu
</title>
22194 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html
</link>
22195 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html
</guid>
22196 <pubDate>Fri,
29 Jul
2011 08:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
22197 <description><p
>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
22198 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
22199 desktop to be useful for more people. The use case for this is my
22200 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
22203 <p
>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
22204 implement. After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
22205 do this in Debian we would have a source.
</p
>
22209 <li
><strong
>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.
</strong
> When there
22210 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
22211 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
22212 tool to handle it. I have no problem guiding both of my parents
22213 through the process over the phone. If a kernel reboot is required,
22214 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool. Last
22215 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
22218 <li
><strong
>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
22219 plugins.
</strong
> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
22220 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
22221 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
22222 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
22223 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
22224 Packages file in the APT archive). If one or more packages are found,
22225 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
22226 type. If the package require the user to accept some non-free
22227 license, this is explained to the user. The entire process make it
22228 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
22229 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
22230 not the browser for any missing features.
</li
>
22232 <li
><strong
>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
22233 handlers.
</strong
> When the media players encounter a format or codec
22234 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
22235 should search for a package that would add support for it. This
22236 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H
.264. The selection
22237 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
22238 plugin handling. This is as far as I know implemented using a
22239 gstreamer hook. The end result is that the user easily get access to
22240 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
22241 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.
</li
>
22243 <li
><strong
>Better browser handling of some MIME types.
</strong
> When
22244 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
22245 start emacs to show it. If I remember correctly, when doing the same
22246 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser. At least I
22247 know Opera will show text files within the browser. I much prefer the
22248 latter behaviour.
</li
>
22252 <p
>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
22253 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
22254 it do not matter much.
</p
>
22256 <p
>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
22257 Debian release. It would require the coordinated effort of several
22258 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.
</p
>
22263 <title>Perl modules used by FixMyStreet which are missing in Debian/Squeeze
</title>
22264 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html
</link>
22265 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html
</guid>
22266 <pubDate>Tue,
26 Jul
2011 12:
25:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
22267 <description><p
>The Norwegian
<a href=
"http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi
</A
>
22268 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
22269 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around
10
22270 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
22271 security support for a few years.
</p
>
22273 <p
>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
22274 that are missing in Debian at the moment. It would be great if these
22275 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
22276 their own
<a href=
"http://www.fixmystreet.com
">FixMyStreet
</a
> clone
22277 in their own country using only Debian packages. The list of modules
22278 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn
't very long, and I hope the perl group
22279 will find time to package the
12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
22280 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
22281 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
22282 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
22283 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
22284 easier in the future.
</p
>
22286 <p
>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
22287 installed on my server was a simple call to
'cpan2deb Module::Name
'
22288 and
'dpkg -i
' to install the resulting package. But this leave me
22289 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
22290 do not have time for.
</p
>
22295 <title>Free Software vs. proprietary softare...
</title>
22296 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html
</link>
22297 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html
</guid>
22298 <pubDate>Mon,
20 Jun
2011 12:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
22299 <description><p
>Reading
22300 <a href=
"http://blog.thingiverse.com/
2011/
06/
20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/
">the
22301 thingiverse blog
</a
>, I came across two highlights of interesting
22303 <a href=
"http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA
">Autodesk
</a
>
22305 <a href=
"http://blog.makezine.com/archive/
2011/
06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html
">Microsoft
22306 Kinect
</a
> End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
22307 quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs. Whenever I take
22308 the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.
</p
>
22313 <title>Experimental Open311 API for the mySociety fixmystreet system
</title>
22314 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experimental_Open311_API_for_the_mySociety_fixmystreet_system.html
</link>
22315 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experimental_Open311_API_for_the_mySociety_fixmystreet_system.html
</guid>
22316 <pubDate>Sat,
30 Apr
2011 17:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
22317 <description><p
>Today, the first draft implementation of an
22318 <a href=
"http://www.open311.org/
">Open311 API
</a
> for the Norwegian
22319 service
<a href=
"http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi
</a
> started to
22320 work. It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
22321 have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
22322 platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
22323 able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
22324 requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
22325 I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
22326 that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.
</p
>
22328 <p
>Where is it? Visit
22329 <a href=
"http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/
">http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/
</a
>
22330 to have a look. Please send feedback to the
22331 <a href=
"http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami
">fiksgatami
22332 (at) nuug.no
</a
> mailing list.
</p
>
22337 <title>Initial notes on adding Open311 server API on FixMyStreet
</title>
22338 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Initial_notes_on_adding_Open311_server_API_on_FixMyStreet.html
</link>
22339 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Initial_notes_on_adding_Open311_server_API_on_FixMyStreet.html
</guid>
22340 <pubDate>Fri,
29 Apr
2011 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
22341 <description><p
>The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
22342 the
<a href=
"http://www.open311.org/
">Open311 API
</a
> in the
22343 <a href=
"http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">Norwegian FixMyStreet service
</a
>.
22344 Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
22345 reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
22346 <a href=
"http://fixmystreet.org.nz/
">New Zealand version
</a
> of
22347 FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
22348 me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
22349 municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
22350 Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
22351 FixMyStreet. The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
22352 to get a draft limping along. In the process, I have discovered a few
22353 issues with the Open311 specification.
</p
>
22355 <p
>One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
22356 handling in the specification. The specification seem to assume all
22357 reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
22358 receiving end to specify which languages are understood there. To be
22359 able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
22360 it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
22361 I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
22362 of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
22363 submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
22364 Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
22365 methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
22366 know which language to use when writing a problem report. I suspect
22367 some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.
</p
>
22369 <p
>A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
22370 which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet. One issue I
22371 run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
22372 each category. The specification do not state that the identifier
22373 should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
22374 here. In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
22375 category. As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
22376 as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
22379 <p
>The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
22380 differ in a key part. FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
22381 while Open311 only have a description and lack the title. I
'm not
22382 quite sure how to best handle this yet. When asking for a FixMyStreet
22383 report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
22384 open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
22385 should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.
</p
>
22387 <p
>The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
22388 near a geographic location. I believe this is important if one is to
22389 use Open311 as the query language for mobile units. The specification
22390 should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
22391 and range= options.
</p
>
22393 <p
>The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
22394 several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
22395 to assume only one administration. For FixMyStreet, this mean a
22396 report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
22397 available depend on the location of the problem. Not quite sure how
22398 to best handle this. I
've noticed
22399 <a href=
"http://seeclickfix.com/open311/
">SeeClickFix
</a
> added
22400 latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
22401 solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
22402 Will have to investigate this a bit more.
</p
>
22404 <p
>My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
22405 up with the open311 developer group. I really wish they had a email
22406 list available via
<a href=
"http://www.gmane.org/
">Gmane
</a
> to use for
22407 discussions instead of only
22408 <a href=
"http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss
">a forum
<a/
>. Oh,
22409 well. That will probably resolve itself, one way or another. I
've
22410 also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
22411 seem to reply to my questions there. This make me wonder if I just
22412 fail to understand how the open311 community work. It sure do not
22413 work like the free software project communities I am used to.
</p
>
22418 <title>Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code
2011</title>
22419 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html
</link>
22420 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html
</guid>
22421 <pubDate>Wed,
6 Apr
2011 09:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
22422 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.getgnash.org/
">The Gnash project
</a
> is still
22423 the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
22424 A few days ago the project
22425 <a href=
"http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/
2011-
04/msg00011.html
">announced
</a
>
22426 that it will participate in Google Summer of Code. I hope many
22427 students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
22428 into Gnash.
</p
>
22433 <title>A Norwegian FixMyStreet have kept me busy the last few weeks
</title>
22434 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html
</link>
22435 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html
</guid>
22436 <pubDate>Sun,
3 Apr
2011 22:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
22437 <description><p
>Here is a small update for my English readers. Most of my blog
22438 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
22439 update in English.
</p
>
22441 <p
>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
22442 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
22443 of the British service
22444 <a href=
"http://www.fixmystreet.com/
">FixMyStreet
</a
> up and running,
22445 and it has been running for a month now. The entire project has been
22446 organised by me and two others. Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
22447 to fund the development work. In January I drafted a contract with
22448 <a href=
"http://www.mysociety.org/
">mySociety
</a
> on what to develop,
22449 and in February the development took place. Most of it involved
22450 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
22451 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
22452 running in any country by now. The Norwegian
22453 <a href=
"http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi
</a
> is using
22454 <a href=
"http://www.openstreetmap.org/
">OpenStreetmap
</a
> as the map
22455 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
22456 support for this had to be added/fixed.
</p
>
22458 <p
>The Norwegian version went live March
3th, and we spent the weekend
22459 polishing the system before we announced it March
7th. The system is
22460 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost
3000
22461 problem reports in a few weeks. Soon we hope to announce the Android
22462 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
22463 public infrastructure.
</p
>
22465 <p
>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
22466 such service?
</p
>
22471 <title>Using NVD and CPE to track CVEs in locally maintained software
</title>
22472 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html
</link>
22473 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html
</guid>
22474 <pubDate>Fri,
28 Jan
2011 15:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
22475 <description><p
>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
22476 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo. My idea is that
22477 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
22478 available on the Internet, and check our locally
22479 maintained/distributed software against this information. It should
22480 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten. The
22481 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
22482 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
22483 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
22484 out which security holes were present in our free software
22485 collection.
</p
>
22487 <p
>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
22488 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
22489 consistent way across data sources. I considered several ways to do
22490 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
22491 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
22492 existing naming scheme. And it seem like I am not the first one to
22493 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
22494 solution. Enter the
<a href=
"http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html
">Common
22495 Platform Enumeration
</a
> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
22496 software, hardware and other platform components. The CPE ids are
22497 mapped to CVEs in the
<a href=
"http://web.nvd.nist.gov/
">National
22498 Vulnerability Database
</a
>, allowing me to look up know security
22499 issues for any CPE name. With this in place, all I need to do is to
22500 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
22501 This is fairly trivial (I google for
'cve cpe $package
' and check the
22502 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).
</p
>
22504 <p
>To give you an example. The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
22505 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip. If the old version
1.3.3 was the package to
22506 check out, one could look up
22507 <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
22508 in NVD
</a
> and get a list of
6 security holes with public CVE entries.
22509 The most recent one is
22510 <a href=
"http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-
2010-
0001">CVE-
2010-
0001</a
>,
22511 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
22512 list of affected versions is provided.
</p
>
22514 <p
>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
22515 for offline processing of issues. Using this dump, I
've written a
22516 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
22517 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs. One give it CPEs
22518 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
22519 security issues out.
</p
>
22521 <p
>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
22522 information need to be high. For that to happen, I believe as many as
22523 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database. I notice
22525 <a href=
"https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt
">a
22526 map from CVE to CPE
</a
>, indicating that they are using the CPE
22527 information. I
'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.
</p
>
22529 <p
>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
22530 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
22531 the CVE database in NVD. The result look fairly good, but there are
22532 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
22533 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
22534 Debian believe are affected by a CVE). Hope to find time to improve
22535 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
22536 someone maintaining it. So far my three emails with questions and
22537 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
22538 established soon.
</p
>
22540 <p
>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
22541 mapping. It would be useful to know which packages in for example
22542 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
22543 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
22544 for their packages.
</p
>
22549 <title>Which module is loaded for a given PCI and USB device?
</title>
22550 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html
</link>
22551 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html
</guid>
22552 <pubDate>Sun,
23 Jan
2011 00:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
22553 <description><p
>In the
22554 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data
">discover-data
</a
>
22555 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
22556 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
22557 information. One part of this script that I find very useful when
22558 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
22559 to the PCI device it claims. It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
22560 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with. To see
22561 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
22562 <tt
>/usr/share/bug/discover-data
3>&1</tt
>. The relevant output on
22563 one of my machines like this:
</p
>
22567 10de:
03eb i2c_nforce2
22570 10de:
03f0 snd_hda_intel
22575 109e:
0878 snd_bt87x
22579 <p
>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
22580 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor
3:
</p
>
22583 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
22584 echo loaded pci modules:
22586 cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
22587 for address in * ; do
22588 if [ -d
"$address/driver/module
" ] ; then
22589 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
22590 if grep -q
"^$module
" /proc/modules ; then
22591 address=$(echo $address |sed s/
0000://)
22592 id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n
1 | awk
'{print $
3}
'`
22593 echo
"$id $module
"
22602 <p
>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
22603 mappings:
</p
>
22606 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
22607 echo loaded usb modules:
22609 cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
22610 for address in * ; do
22611 if [ -d
"$address/driver/module
" ] ; then
22612 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
22613 if grep -q
"^$module
" /proc/modules ; then
22614 address=$(echo $address |sed s/
0000://)
22615 id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n
1 | awk
'{print $
6}
')
22616 if [
"$id
" ] ; then
22617 echo
"$id $module
"
22627 <p
>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
22633 <title>The video format most supported in web browsers?
</title>
22634 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_video_format_most_supported_in_web_browsers_.html
</link>
22635 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_video_format_most_supported_in_web_browsers_.html
</guid>
22636 <pubDate>Sun,
16 Jan
2011 00:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
22637 <description><p
>The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
22638 contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H
.264 and WebM. Most video sites
22639 seem to use H
.264, while others use Ogg Theora. Interestingly enough,
22640 the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
22641 H
.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
22642 the Wikipedia article on
22643 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video
">HTML5 video
</a
>,
22644 this is not true. Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
22645 different browsers there. The format supported by most browsers is
22646 Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
22647 Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
22648 BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
22649 The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
22650 Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
22651 Firefox. H
.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
22652 Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
22653 Explorer. Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
22654 Safari can install plugins to get it.
</p
>
22656 <p
>To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
22657 without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
22658 HTML5 video tag. Of course to reach all those without a browser
22659 handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms. In
22660 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">NUUG
</a
>, we provide first fallback to a
22661 plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
22662 we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
22663 Theora. This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an
<a
22664 href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20110111-semantic-web/
">example
22665 from last week
</a
>.
</p
>
22667 <p
>The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H
.264 is
22668 the least supported is simple. Implementing and using H
.264
22669 require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
22670 are incompatible with free software licensing. If you believed H
.264
22671 was without royalties and license terms, check out
22672 "<a href=
"http://webmink.com/essays/h-
264/
">H
.264 – Not The Kind Of
22673 Free That Matters
</a
>" by Simon Phipps.
</p
>
22675 <p
>A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
22677 <a href=
"http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos
">the
22678 Xiph.org wiki
</a
>, if you want to have a look. I
'm not aware of a
22679 similar list for WebM nor H
.264.
</p
>
22681 <p
>Update
2011-
01-
16 09:
40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
22682 realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
22683 &lt;video
&gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
22684 provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.
</p
>
22689 <title>Chrome plan to drop H
.264 support for HTML5
&lt;video
&gt;
</title>
22690 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Chrome_plan_to_drop_H_264_support_for_HTML5__lt_video_gt_.html
</link>
22691 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Chrome_plan_to_drop_H_264_support_for_HTML5__lt_video_gt_.html
</guid>
22692 <pubDate>Wed,
12 Jan
2011 22:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
22693 <description><p
>Today I discovered
22694 <a href=
"http://www.digi.no/
860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome
">via
22695 digi.no
</a
> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
22696 <a href=
"http://blog.chromium.org/
2011/
01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html
">yesterday
22697 announced
</a
> plans to drop H
.264 support for HTML5
&lt;video
&gt; in
22698 the browser. The argument used is that H
.264 is not a
"completely
22699 open
" codec technology. If you believe H
.264 was free for everyone
22700 to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
22701 "<a href=
"http://webmink.com/essays/h-
264/
">H
.264 – Not The Kind Of
22702 Free That Matters
</a
>". It is not free of cost for creators of video
22703 tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
22704 terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
22705 licensing the patents needed for H
.264. Some background information
22706 on the Google announcement is available from
22707 <a href=
"http://www.osnews.com/story/
24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome
">OSnews
</a
>.
22708 A good read. :)
</p
>
22710 <p
>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
22711 promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
22712 the Internet. This can only be done by publishing using free and open
22713 standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
22714 for these free and open standards. At the moment there seem to be two
22715 camps in the web browser world when it come to video support. Some
22716 browsers support H
.264, and others support
22717 <a href=
"http://www.theora.org/
">Ogg Theora
</a
> and
22718 <a href=
"http://www.webmproject.org/
">WebM
</a
>
22719 (
<a href=
"http://www.diracvideo.org/
">Dirac
</a
> is not really an option
22720 yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
22721 and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
22722 H
.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
22723 Wikipedia keep
<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video
">an
22724 updated summary
</a
> of the current browser support.
</p
>
22726 <p
>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
22727 promoting H
.264, and John Gruber
22728 <a href=
"http://daringfireball.net/
2011/
01/simple_questions
">presents
22729 the mind set
</a
> of these people quite well. His rhetorical questions
22730 provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
22731 <a href=
"http://www.osnews.com/story/
24245/
10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM
">presenting
22732 the issues with H
.264</a
>. Both are worth a read.
</p
>
22734 <p
>Some argue that if Google is dropping H
.264 because it isn
't free,
22735 they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin. This
22736 argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
22737 <a href=
"http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/
2011/
01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm
">todays
22738 blog post
</a
>, which I find to put the issue in context. To me it
22739 make perfect sense to drop native H
.264 support for HTML5 in the
22740 browser while still allowing plugins.
</p
>
22742 <p
>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
22743 is that all the users and promoters of H
.264 suddenly get an uneasy
22744 feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse. A lot of TV
22745 broadcasters have been moving to H
.264 the last few years, and a lot
22746 of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
22747 could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
22748 publishing. Suddenly this belief is shaken.
</p
>
22750 <p
>An interesting question is why Google is doing this. While the
22751 presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
22752 present the argument if the change make sense from a business
22753 perspective. One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
22754 with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
22755 feeling that dropping H
.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
22756 Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
22757 Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
22758 to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
22759 video format not requiring royalties at all. A third reason might be
22760 that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
22761 Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
22762 I guess time will tell.
</p
>
22764 <p
>Update
2011-
01-
15: The Google Chrome team provided
22765 <a href=
"http://blog.chromium.org/
2011/
01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html
">more
22766 background and information on the move
</a
> it a blog post yesterday.
</p
>
22771 <title>What standards are Free and Open as defined by Digistan?
</title>
22772 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_standards_are_Free_and_Open_as_defined_by_Digistan_.html
</link>
22773 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_standards_are_Free_and_Open_as_defined_by_Digistan_.html
</guid>
22774 <pubDate>Thu,
30 Dec
2010 23:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
22775 <description><p
>After trying to
22776 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html
">compare
22777 Ogg Theora
</a
> to
22778 <a href=
"http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition
">the Digistan
22779 definition
</a
> of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
22780 to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
22781 this. As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
22782 the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-
8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
22783 JPEG, PNG, SVG and others. But to be able to complete this in a
22784 reasonable time frame, I will need help.
</p
>
22786 <p
>If you want to help out with this work, please visit
22787 <a href=
"http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse
">the
22788 wiki pages I have set up for this
</a
>, and let me know that you want
22789 to help out. The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
22790 place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
22791 NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
22792 of the Norwegian Unix User Group).
</p
>
22794 <p
>The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do. Do not be
22795 scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)
</p
>
22800 <title>The many definitions of a open standard
</title>
22801 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html
</link>
22802 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html
</guid>
22803 <pubDate>Mon,
27 Dec
2010 14:
45:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
22804 <description><p
>One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
22805 "<a href=
"http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition
">Free and
22806 Open Standard
</a
>" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
22807 the term has been decided by Digistan. The term
"Open Standard
" has
22808 become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
22809 about standards. One end up discussing which definition is the best
22810 one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
22811 de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.
</p
>
22813 <p
>But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
22814 standards, here are a few that I know about. This list is not
22815 complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
22816 complete survey. More definitions are available on the
22817 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard
">wikipedia
22818 page
</a
>.
</p
>
22820 <p
>First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
22821 Interoperability Framework version
1.0. Really sad to notice that BSA
22822 and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version
2.0 of the
22823 framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
22824 their own people. Anyway, the definition is still available and it
22825 include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
22826 specification on equal terms.
</p
>
22830 <p
>The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
22831 and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
22832 open standard:
</p
>
22836 <li
>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
22837 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
22838 open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
22839 (consensus or majority decision etc.).
</li
>
22841 <li
>The standard has been published and the standard specification
22842 document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
22843 permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
22844 nominal fee.
</li
>
22846 <li
>The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
22847 (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
22848 free basis.
</li
>
22850 <li
>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.
</li
>
22853 </blockquote
>
22855 <p
>Another one originates from my friends over at
22856 <a href=
"http://www.dkuug.dk/
">DKUUG
</a
>, who coined and gathered
22857 support for
<a href=
"http://www.aaben-standard.dk/
">this
22858 definition
</a
> in
2004. It even made it into the Danish parlament as
22859 <a href=
"http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/
20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm
">their
22860 definition of a open standard
</a
>. Another from a different part of
22861 the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.
</p
>
22865 <p
>En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:
</p
>
22869 <li
>Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
22870 tilgængelig.
</li
>
22872 <li
>Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
22873 begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.
</li
>
22875 <li
>Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
22876 "standardiseringsorganisation
") via en åben proces.
</li
>
22880 </blockquote
>
22882 <p
>Then there is
<a href=
"http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html
">the
22883 definition
</a
> from Free Software Foundation Europe.
</p
>
22887 <p
>An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is
</p
>
22891 <li
>subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
22892 manner equally available to all parties;
</li
>
22894 <li
>without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
22895 formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
22896 Standard themselves;
</li
>
22898 <li
>free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
22899 any party or in any business model;
</li
>
22901 <li
>managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
22902 in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
22903 parties;
</li
>
22905 <li
>available in multiple complete implementations by competing
22906 vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
22907 parties.
</li
>
22911 </blockquote
>
22913 <p
>A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
22915 <a href=
"http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%
20Standard%
20Definition.pdf
">Open
22916 Standards Checklist
</a
> with a fairly detailed description.
</p
>
22919 <p
>Creation and Management of an Open Standard
22923 <li
>Its development and management process must be collaborative and
22928 <li
>Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
22929 participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
22930 imposed by the organization under which it is developed
22931 and managed.
</li
>
22933 <li
>The processes must be documented and, through a known
22934 method, can be changed through input from all
22935 participants.
</li
>
22937 <li
>The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
22938 the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.
</li
>
22940 <li
>Development and management should strive for consensus,
22941 and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.
</li
>
22943 <li
>The standard specification must be open to extensive
22944 public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
22945 comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.
</li
>
22953 <p
>Use and Licensing of an Open Standard
</p
>
22956 <li
>The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
22957 and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
22958 implementations to the interface described in the standard without
22959 undue or restrictive constraints. Interfaces include APIs,
22960 protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.
</li
>
22962 <li
> The standard must not contain any proprietary
"hooks
" that create
22963 a technical or economic barriers
</li
>
22965 <li
>Faithful implementations of the standard must
22966 interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
22967 program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
22968 programs and mutually to use the information which has been
22969 exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
22970 file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
22971 conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
22972 computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
22973 intended to function.
</li
>
22975 <li
>It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
22976 standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
22977 must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.
</li
>
22979 <li
>It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
22980 fees; also known as
"royalty free
"), worldwide, non-exclusive and
22981 perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
22982 sell products based on the standard. The only exceptions are
22983 terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
22984 outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
22985 patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
22986 only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
22990 <li
> May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
22991 licensees
' patent claims essential to practice that standard
22992 (also known as a reciprocity clause)
</li
>
22994 <li
> May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
22995 or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
22996 essential to practice that standard (also known as a
22997 "defensive suspension
" clause)
</li
>
22999 <li
> The same licensing terms are available to every potential
23000 licensor
</li
>
23005 <li
>The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
23006 implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
23007 or restricted licensing terms
</li
>
23011 </blockquote
>
23013 <p
>It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
23014 there are so many of them. As you can see, the same holds true for
23015 open standard definitions. Most of the definitions have a lot in
23016 common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
23017 standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
23018 possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
23019 competition to downplay the significance of open standards. I hope we
23020 can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
23021 Standards.
</p
>
23026 <title>Is Ogg Theora a free and open standard?
</title>
23027 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html
</link>
23028 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html
</guid>
23029 <pubDate>Sat,
25 Dec
2010 20:
25:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
23030 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition
">The
23031 Digistan definition
</a
> of a free and open standard reads like this:
</p
>
23035 <p
>The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
23036 as follows:
</p
>
23040 <li
>A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
23041 in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
23042 freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.
</li
>
23044 <li
>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
23045 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
23046 open decision-making procedure available to all interested
23047 parties.
</li
>
23049 <li
>The standard has been published and the standard specification
23050 document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
23051 distribute, and use it freely.
</li
>
23053 <li
>The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
23054 irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.
</li
>
23056 <li
>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.
</li
>
23060 <p
>The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
23061 measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
23062 products based on the standard.
</p
>
23063 </blockquote
>
23065 <p
>For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
23066 and open standard according to this definition. Here is a short
23067 writeup of what I have been able to gather so far. I brought up the
23068 topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
23069 <a href=
"http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/
2009-July/
001632.html
">in
23070 July
2009</a
>, for those that want to see some background information.
23071 According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
23072 the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.
</p
>
23074 <p
><strong
>Free from vendor capture?
</strong
></p
>
23076 <p
>As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
23077 Ogg Theora specification. It can be argued that the
23078 <a href=
"http://www.xiph.org/
">Xiph foundation
</A
> is such vendor, but
23079 given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
23080 making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
23081 obvious that this is a real risk. One issue with the Xiph
23082 foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
23083 control the foundation) are not easily available on the web. I
've
23084 been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
23085 seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
23086 where is is spent in the foundation. It is thus not obvious for an
23087 external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
23088 it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
23089 specification. But it seem unlikely.
</p
>
23091 <p
><strong
>Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?
</strong
></p
>
23093 <p
>Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
23094 claim it to be, this point is fulfilled. If Xiph foundation is
23095 controlled by a single vendor, it isn
't, but I have not found any
23096 documentation indicating this.
</p
>
23098 <p
>According to
23099 <a href=
"http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf
">a report
</a
>
23100 prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
23101 government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
23102 the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
23103 Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
23104 report is correct.
</p
>
23106 <p
><strong
>Specification freely available?
</strong
></p
>
23108 <p
>The specification for the
<a href=
"http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/
">Ogg
23109 container format
</a
> and both the
23110 <a href=
"http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/
">Vorbis
</a
> and
23111 <a href=
"http://theora.org/doc/
">Theora
</a
> codeces are available on
23112 the web. This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:
23116 Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
23117 specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
23118 capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
23119 the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
23120 specification compliance.
23122 </blockquote
>
23124 <p
>The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
23125 <a href=
"http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt
">RFC
3533</a
>, and
23126 this is the term:
<p
>
23130 <p
>This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
23131 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
23132 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
23133 distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
23134 provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
23135 included on all such copies and derivative works. However, this
23136 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
23137 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
23138 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
23139 Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
23140 in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
23141 translate it into languages other than English.
</p
>
23143 <p
>The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
23144 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.
</p
>
23145 </blockquote
>
23147 <p
>All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
23148 this term seem to be fulfilled. There might be a problem with the
23149 missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
23150 thus reuse it in other specifications. Not quite sure if that is a
23151 requirement for the Digistan definition.
</p
>
23153 <p
><strong
>Royalty-free?
</strong
></p
>
23155 <p
>There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
23157 <a href=
"http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=
65782">MPEG-LA
</a
>
23159 <a href=
"http://yro.slashdot.org/story/
10/
04/
30/
237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit
">Steve
23160 Jobs
</a
> in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
23161 patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
23162 them. Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
23163 this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
23164 without paying any royalties. For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
23165 Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H
.264 codec
23166 than any real problem with Ogg Theora.
</p
>
23168 <p
><strong
>No constraints on re-use?
</strong
></p
>
23170 <p
>I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.
</p
>
23172 <p
><strong
>Conclusion
</strong
></p
>
23174 <p
>3 of
5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining
2
23175 depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation. Given the
23176 background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
23177 safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
23178 would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
23181 <p
>It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
23182 see if they are free and open standards.
</p
>
23187 <title>The reply from Edgar Villanueva to Microsoft in Peru
</title>
23188 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_reply_from_Edgar_Villanueva_to_Microsoft_in_Peru.html
</link>
23189 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_reply_from_Edgar_Villanueva_to_Microsoft_in_Peru.html
</guid>
23190 <pubDate>Sat,
25 Dec
2010 10:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
23191 <description><p
>A few days ago
23192 <a href=
"http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece
">an
23193 article
</a
> in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
23195 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework
">European
23196 Interoperability Framework
</a
> has been successfully lobbied by the
23197 proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
23198 Nothing very surprising there, given
23199 <a href=
"http://news.slashdot.org/story/
10/
03/
29/
2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe
">earlier
23200 reports
</a
> on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
23201 this work. But I find this very sad. The definition of
23202 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-
200506.txt
">an
23203 open standard from version
1</a
> was very good, and something I
23204 believe should be used also in the future, alongside
23205 <a href=
"http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition
">the
23206 definition from Digistan
</A
>. Version
2 have removed the open
23207 standard definition from its content.
</p
>
23209 <p
>Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
23210 Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
23211 to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
23212 in the public sector in Peru. As the text was not available from a
23213 few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
23214 <a href=
"http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html
">my
23215 source
</a
> to ensure it is available also in the future. Some
23216 background information about that story is available in
23217 <a href=
"http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/
6099">an article
</a
> from
23218 Linux Journal in
2002.
</p
>
23221 <p
>Lima,
8th of April,
2002<br
>
23222 To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ
<br
>
23223 General Manager of Microsoft Perú
</p
>
23225 <p
>Dear Sir:
</p
>
23227 <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
>
23229 <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
>
23231 <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
>
23233 <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
>
23237 <li
>Free access to public information by the citizen.
</li
>
23238 <li
>Permanence of public data.
</li
>
23239 <li
>Security of the State and citizens.
</li
>
23243 <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
>
23245 <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
>
23247 <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
>
23249 <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
>
23251 <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
>
23254 <p
>From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:
<br
>
23255 <li
>the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software
</li
>
23256 <li
>the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software
</li
>
23257 <li
>the law does not specify which concrete software to use
</li
>
23258 <li
>the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought
</li
>
23259 <li
>the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.
</li
>
23263 <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
>
23265 <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
>
23267 <p
>As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:
</p
>
23269 <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
>
23271 <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
>
23273 <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
>
23275 <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
>
23277 <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
>
23279 <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
>
23281 <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
>
23283 <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
>
23285 <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
>
23287 <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
>
23289 <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
>
23291 <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
>
23293 <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
>
23295 <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
>
23297 <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
>
23299 <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
>
23301 <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
>
23303 <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
>
23305 <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
>
23307 <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
>
23309 <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
>
23311 <p
>On security:
</p
>
23313 <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
>
23315 <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
>
23317 <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
>
23319 <p
>In respect of the guarantee:
</p
>
23321 <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
>
23323 <p
>On Intellectual Property:
</p
>
23325 <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
>
23327 <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
>
23329 <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
>
23331 <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
>
23333 <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
>
23335 <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
>
23337 <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
>
23339 <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
>
23341 <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
>
23343 <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
>
23345 <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
>
23347 <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
>
23349 <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
>
23351 <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
>
23353 <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
>
23355 <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
>
23357 <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
>
23359 <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
>
23361 <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
>
23363 <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
>
23365 <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
>
23367 <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
>
23369 <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
>
23371 <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
>
23373 <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
>
23375 <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
>
23377 <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
>
23379 <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
>
23381 <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
>
23383 <p
>Cordially,
<br
>
23384 DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ
<br
>
23385 Congressman of the Republic of Perú.
</p
>
23386 </blockquote
>
23391 <title>Officeshots still going strong
</title>
23392 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html
</link>
23393 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html
</guid>
23394 <pubDate>Sat,
25 Dec
2010 09:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
23395 <description><p
>Half a year ago I
23396 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html
">wrote
23397 a bit
</a
> about
<a href=
"http://www.officeshots.org/
">OfficeShots
</a
>,
23398 a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
23399 the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.
</p
>
23401 <p
>I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
23402 Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
23403 different Office implementations handle different ODF features. Sad
23404 to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
23405 LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
23406 for OfficeShots users yet). I am glad to see that the ODF community
23407 got such a great test tool available.
</p
>
23412 <title>How to test if a laptop is working with Linux
</title>
23413 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html
</link>
23414 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html
</guid>
23415 <pubDate>Wed,
22 Dec
2010 14:
55:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
23416 <description><p
>The last few days I have spent at work here at the
<a
23417 href=
"http://www.uio.no/
">University of Oslo
</a
> testing if the new
23418 batch of computers will work with Linux. Every year for the last few
23419 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
23420 computers, and this year HP won the bid. Two different desktops and
23421 five different laptops are on the list this year. We in the UNIX
23422 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
23423 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
23424 university.
</p
>
23426 <p
>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
23427 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well. To test, I PXE
23428 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
23429 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware. When
23430 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
23431 on. If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
23432 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
23433 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.
</p
>
23435 <p
>Anyway, to get to the point of this post. Here is the simple tests
23436 I perform on a new model.
</p
>
23440 <li
>Is PXE installation working? I
'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
23441 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment. If I feel like it, I also test with
23442 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.
</li
>
23444 <li
>Is X.org working? If the graphical login screen show up after
23445 installation, X.org is working.
</li
>
23447 <li
>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working? Running glxgears (in
23448 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
23449 reported by the program.
</li
>
23451 <li
>Is sound working? With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
23452 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful. If there
23453 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
23454 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound. I
23455 normally test this by playing
23456 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20101012-chef/
">a HTML5
23457 video
</a
> in Firefox/Iceweasel.
</li
>
23459 <li
>Is the USB subsystem working? I test this by plugging in a USB
23460 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.
</li
>
23462 <li
>Is the CD/DVD player working? I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
23463 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.
</li
>
23465 <li
>Is any built in camera working? Test using cheese, and see if a
23466 picture from the v4l device show up.
</li
>
23468 <li
>Is bluetooth working? Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
23469 any bluetooth devices are discovered. In my office, I normally see a
23472 <li
>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working. I have
23473 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
23474 notice this.
</li
>
23476 <li
>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working? I
'm testing if the
23477 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
23480 <li
>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
23481 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
23482 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc? The set of buttons differ from
23483 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
23486 <li
>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
23487 acceleration sensors etc. I rarely test these, as I do not know how
23488 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
23489 existence.
</li
>
23493 <p
>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
23494 for the HP machines I am testing. I
'm not done yet, so I will report
23495 the test results later. For now I can report that HP
8100 Elite work
23496 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook
8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
23497 and audio fail on RHEL6. Ubuntu Maverik worked with
8440p. As you
23498 can see, I have most machines left to test. One interesting
23499 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
23500 RHEL6 with glxgears. No idea why.
</p
>
23505 <title>Some thoughts on BitCoins
</title>
23506 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html
</link>
23507 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html
</guid>
23508 <pubDate>Sat,
11 Dec
2010 15:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
23509 <description><p
>As I continue to explore
23510 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/
">BitCoin
</a
>, I
've starting to wonder
23511 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
23512 and regulations here in Norway. Here are some random notes.
</p
>
23514 <p
>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
23515 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
23516 is known to everyone. This means that if a BitCoin address has been
23517 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
23518 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
23519 that address. There is even a web service to look at the details for
23520 all transactions. There I can see that my address
23521 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
>
23522 have received
16.06 Bitcoin, the
23523 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/
1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv
8MHqvwst
3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv
8MHqvwst
3</a
>
23524 address of Simon Phipps have received
181.97 BitCoin and the address
23525 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/
1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt
">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt
</A
>
23526 of EFF have received
2447.38 BitCoins so far. Thank you to each and
23527 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
23528 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
23529 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
23530 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction. I
'm told
23531 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
23532 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
23533 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.
</p
>
23535 <p
>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
23536 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
23537 without declaring it. There are money laundering, tax and accounting
23538 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
23539 If the Skolelinux foundation
23540 (
<a href=
"http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html
">SLX
23541 Debian Labs
</a
>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
23542 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
23543 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
23544 not, should everything or nothing be declared? What exchange rate
23545 should be used when calculating taxes? Would receivers have to pay
23546 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
23547 BitCoin? I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.
</p
>
23549 <p
>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
23550 accepted by a lot of users. It must be possible to get easy access to
23551 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
23552 easy to spend it. At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
23553 access to, but there are very few places to spend it. I am not really
23554 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
23555 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins. I
23556 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
23557 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
23558 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
23559 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular. I
'm sure they
23560 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
23561 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
23562 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
23563 currencies.
</p
>
23565 <p
>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
23566 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
23567 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
23568 to see which one get the next lump of cash). The
"winner
" get
50
23569 BitCoin when this happen. Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
23570 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
23571 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
23572 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the
50
23573 BitCoins. Check out
23574 <a href=
"http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/
">BitCoin Pool
</a
>
23575 if this sounds interesting. I have not had time to try to set up a
23576 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
23577 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
23580 <p
>Update
2010-
12-
15: Found an
<a
23581 href=
"http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi
">interesting
23582 criticism
</a
> of bitcoin. Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
23583 it was interesting to read. The arguments presented seem to be
23584 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.
</p
>
23589 <title>Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money
</title>
23590 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html
</link>
23591 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html
</guid>
23592 <pubDate>Fri,
10 Dec
2010 08:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
23593 <description><p
>With this weeks lawless
23594 <a href=
"http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/
2010/
12/
06/wikileaks/index.html
">governmental
23595 attacks
</a
> on Wikileak and
23596 <a href=
"http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/
2010/
12/
06/war_on_speech
">free
23597 speech
</a
>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
23598 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
23600 <a href=
"http://webmink.com/
2010/
12/
06/now-accepting-bitcoin/
">Simon
23601 Phipps on bitcoin
</a
> reminded me about a project that a friend of
23602 mine mentioned earlier. I decided to follow Simon
's example, and get
23603 involved with
<a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/
">BitCoin
</a
>. I got
23604 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
23605 some bitcoins to get started. I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
23606 for helping me remember BitCoin.
</p
>
23608 <p
>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder? It is a digital
23609 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
23610 networks. It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
23611 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
23612 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions. The
23613 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets
2.9
23614 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
23615 line client builds just fine. Hopefully Jonas
23616 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
578157">will get the package into
23617 Debian
</a
> soon.
</p
>
23619 <p
>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
23620 There are
<a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/trade
">companies accepting
23621 bitcoins
</a
> when selling services and goods, and there are even
23622 currency
"stock
" markets where the exchange rate is decided. There
23623 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising. If you
23624 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
23626 <a href=
"https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/
">some for free
</a
> (
0.05
23627 bitcoin at the time of writing). Use
23628 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/
">BitcoinWatch
</a
> to keep an eye
23629 on the current exchange rates.
</p
>
23631 <p
>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
23632 machines. If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
23633 donations to the address
23634 <b
>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</b
>. Thank you!
</p
>
23639 <title>Student group continue the work on my Reprap
3D printer
</title>
23640 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Student_group_continue_the_work_on_my_Reprap_3D_printer.html
</link>
23641 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Student_group_continue_the_work_on_my_Reprap_3D_printer.html
</guid>
23642 <pubDate>Thu,
9 Dec
2010 19:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
23643 <description><p
>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
23644 student assosiation
<a href=
"http://www.robotica.no/
">Robotica
23645 Osloensis
</a
> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
23646 get their own
3D printer. They wanted to learn from me based on my
23647 work in the area. After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
23648 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
23649 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon. I look
23650 forward to see how this goes. This monday their volunteer driver
23651 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
23652 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the
3D printer
23653 operational.
</p
>
23655 <p
>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
23656 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational. I really look
23657 forward to being able to print all the cool
3D designs published on
23658 <a href=
"http://www.thingiverse.com/
">Thingiverse
</a
>. I even got
23659 some
3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
23660 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
23661 very cool
3D scanner.
</p
>
23666 <title>Debian Edu development gathering and General Assembly for FRiSK
</title>
23667 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_development_gathering_and_General_Assembly_for_FRiSK.html
</link>
23668 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_development_gathering_and_General_Assembly_for_FRiSK.html
</guid>
23669 <pubDate>Mon,
29 Nov
2010 18:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
23670 <description><p
>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
23671 <a href=
"http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/
2010-
12-
03-
05-Oslo
">development
23672 gathering
</a
> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway. I
23673 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
23674 Squeeze release. The gathering is open for everyone interested in
23675 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.
</p
>
23677 <p
>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
23678 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
23680 <a href=
"http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/
2010">General Assembly
23681 for
2010</a
>. Membership is open for all, and currently there are
388
23682 people registered as members. Last year
32 members cast their vote in
23683 the memberdb based election system. I hope more people find time to
23684 vote this year.
</p
>
23689 <title>Why isn
't Debian Edu using VLC?
</title>
23690 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html
</link>
23691 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html
</guid>
23692 <pubDate>Sat,
27 Nov
2010 11:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
23693 <description><p
>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
23694 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
23695 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
23696 to play a video file or stream. Only if VLC fail will I drag out
23697 gmplayer to see if it can do better. The reason is mostly the failure
23698 model and trust. When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
23699 reporting the problem. When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
23700 just hangs. The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.
<p
>
23702 <p
>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
23703 mplayer in
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian
23704 Edu/Skolelinux
</a
>. The reason is simple. We need a good browser
23705 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
23706 not very good. For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
23707 is no way for the user to pause the video. Also, when I
23708 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia
">last
23709 tested the browser plugins
</a
> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
23710 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked. If
23711 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
23712 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.
</P
>
23714 <p
>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
23715 annoying. The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
23716 keyboard shortcuts. When the player is in full screen mode, its
23717 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
23718 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode. I
23719 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
23720 window mode. Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
23721 the current video. It is very nice when playing short videos from the
23722 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
23723 what is going on.
</p
>
23728 <title>Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrades of the Gnome and KDE desktop, now with apt-get autoremove
</title>
23729 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html
</link>
23730 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html
</guid>
23731 <pubDate>Mon,
22 Nov
2010 14:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
23732 <description><p
>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
23733 upgrade testing of the
23734 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/
">Lenny
23735 Gnome and KDE Desktop
</a
> to do
<tt
>apt-get autoremove
</tt
> when using apt-get.
23736 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
23737 can now present the updated result from today:
</p
>
23739 <p
>This is for Gnome:
</p
>
23741 <p
>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p
>
23743 <blockquote
><p
>
23748 browser-plugin-gnash
23755 freedesktop-sound-theme
23757 gconf-defaults-service
23770 gnome-codec-install
23772 gnome-desktop-environment
23776 gnome-session-canberra
23778 gnome-themes-extras
23781 gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
23782 gstreamer0.10-tools
23784 gtk2-engines-pixbuf
23785 gtk2-engines-smooth
23787 libapache2-mod-dnssd
23790 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
23793 libboost-date-time1.42
.0
23794 libboost-python1.42
.0
23795 libboost-thread1.42
.0
23797 libchamplain-gtk-
0.4-
0
23799 libclutter-gtk-
0.10-
0
23806 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
23819 libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
23821 libgnomepanel2.24-cil
23826 libgtksourceview2.0-common
23827 libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
23828 libmono-addins0.2-cil
23829 libmono-cairo2.0-cil
23830 libmono-corlib2.0-cil
23831 libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
23832 libmono-posix2.0-cil
23833 libmono-security2.0-cil
23834 libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
23835 libmono-system2.0-cil
23838 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
23839 libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
23849 libtelepathy-farsight0
23858 nautilus-sendto-empathy
23862 python-aptdaemon-gtk
23864 python-beautifulsoup
23879 python-gtksourceview2
23890 python-pkg-resources
23897 python-twisted-conch
23898 python-twisted-core
23903 python-zope.interface
23905 remmina-plugin-data
23908 rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
23915 system-config-printer-udev
23917 telepathy-mission-control-
5
23924 transmission-common
23928 </p
></blockquote
>
23930 <p
>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p
>
23932 <blockquote
><p
>
23936 epiphany-extensions
23938 fast-user-switch-applet
23957 libgtksourceview2.0-
0
23959 libsdl1.2debian-alsa
23965 system-config-printer
23970 </p
></blockquote
>
23972 <p
>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p
>
23974 <blockquote
><p
>
23975 gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
23976 </p
></blockquote
>
23978 <p
>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p
>
23980 <blockquote
><p
>
23982 </p
></blockquote
>
23984 <p
>This is for KDE:
</p
>
23986 <p
>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p
>
23988 <blockquote
><p
>
23990 </p
></blockquote
>
23992 <p
>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p
>
23994 <blockquote
><p
>
23996 network-manager-kde
23997 </p
></blockquote
>
23999 <p
>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p
>
24001 <blockquote
><p
>
24015 kdeartwork-emoticons
24017 kdeartwork-theme-icon
24021 kdebase-workspace-bin
24022 kdebase-workspace-data
24034 konqueror-nsplugins
24036 kscreensaver-xsavers
24051 plasma-dataengines-workspace
24053 plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
24054 plasma-runners-addons
24055 plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
24056 plasma-scriptengine-python
24057 plasma-scriptengine-qedje
24058 plasma-scriptengine-ruby
24059 plasma-scriptengine-webkit
24060 plasma-scriptengines
24061 plasma-wallpapers-addons
24062 plasma-widget-folderview
24063 plasma-widget-networkmanagement
24066 update-notifier-kde
24067 xscreensaver-data-extra
24069 xscreensaver-gl-extra
24070 xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
24071 </p
></blockquote
>
24073 <p
>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p
>
24075 <blockquote
><p
>
24077 google-gadgets-common
24095 libggadget-qt-
1.0-
0b
24100 libkonqsidebarplugin4a
24104 libkunitconversion4
24109 libplasma-geolocation-interface4
24111 libplasmagenericshell4
24125 libsmokeknewstuff2-
3
24126 libsmokeknewstuff3-
3
24128 libsmokektexteditor3
24136 libsmokeqtnetwork4-
3
24137 libsmokeqtopengl4-
3
24138 libsmokeqtscript4-
3
24142 libsmokeqtuitools4-
3
24143 libsmokeqtwebkit4-
3
24154 plasma-dataengines-addons
24155 plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
24156 plasma-widget-lancelot
24157 plasma-widgets-addons
24158 plasma-widgets-workspace
24162 update-notifier-common
24163 </p
></blockquote
>
24165 <p
>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
24166 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
24167 differences. I have no idea what packages should be installed after
24168 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.
</p
>
24173 <title>Migrating Xen virtual machines using LVM to KVM using disk images
</title>
24174 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html
</link>
24175 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html
</guid>
24176 <pubDate>Mon,
22 Nov
2010 11:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
24177 <description><p
>Most of the computers in use by the
24178 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project
</a
>
24179 are virtual machines. And they have been Xen machines running on a
24180 fairly old IBM eserver xseries
345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
24181 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge
2950 host machine. This was a
24182 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
24183 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
24184 know is not supported by KVM. So to migrate, we had to convert
24185 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.
</p
>
24188 <a href=
"http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/
35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
">a
24189 nice recipe
</a
> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
24190 migration. It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
24191 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
24192 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data. I NFS mounted the
24193 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.
</p
>
24199 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/
35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
24204 if [ -z
"$
1" ] ; then
24205 echo
"Usage: $
0 &lt;hostname
&gt;
"
24208 host=
"$
1"
24211 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
24212 echo
"error: unable to find LVM volume for $host
"
24216 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs. not sure why.
24217 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk
'{sum = sum + $
4} END { print int(sum *
1.05) }
')
24218 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk
'{sum = sum + $
4} END { print int(sum *
1.05) }
')
24219 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
24222 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=
1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
24223 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
24225 parted $img mklabel msdos
24226 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap
0 $disksize
24227 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
24228 parted $img set
1 boot on
24231 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
24232 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
24234 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=
1M
24235 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
24236 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
24238 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
24239 losetup -d /dev/loop0
24242 <p
>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
24243 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.
</p
>
24245 <p
>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
24246 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-
686 and
24247 set up grub to boot from the disk image. After this, the KVM machines
24248 seem to work just fine.
</p
>
24253 <title>Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome and KDE desktop
</title>
24254 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html
</link>
24255 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html
</guid>
24256 <pubDate>Sat,
20 Nov
2010 22:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
24257 <description><p
>I
'm still running upgrade testing of the
24258 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/
">Lenny
24259 Gnome and KDE Desktop
</a
>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
24260 status. Here is a short update based on a test I ran
20101118.
</p
>
24262 <p
>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
24263 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
24264 can see if anything should be changed.
</p
>
24266 <p
>This is for Gnome:
</p
>
24268 <p
>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p
>
24270 <blockquote
><p
>
24271 apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
24272 browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-
4.3 cups-pk-helper
24273 dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
24274 freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
24275 gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
24276 geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
24277 gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
24278 gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
24279 gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
24280 gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
24281 gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
24282 gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
24283 gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
24284 libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
24285 libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-
0 libboost-date-time1.42
.0
24286 libboost-python1.42
.0 libboost-thread1.42
.0 libchamplain-
0.4-
0
24287 libchamplain-gtk-
0.4-
0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-
0.10-
0
24288 libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-
1.0-
2
24289 libepc-common libepc-ui-
1.0-
2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
24290 libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
24291 libgdl-
1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-
0 libgif4
24292 libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
24293 libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
24294 libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
24295 libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
24296 libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
24297 libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
24298 libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
24299 libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
24300 libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-
6
24301 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6
.8
24302 libpolkit-gtk-
1-
0 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-alsa
24303 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6
.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
24304 libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-
4
24305 libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-
0.99-
0
24306 libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
24307 mono-
2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
24308 nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
24309 openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-
4suite-xml
24310 python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
24311 python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
24312 python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
24313 python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
24314 python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
24315 python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
24316 python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
24317 python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
24318 python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
24319 python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
24320 python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
24321 python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
24322 python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
24323 remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
24324 rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
24325 software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
24326 telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-
5 telepathy-salut tomboy
24327 totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
24328 transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
24330 </p
></blockquote
>
24332 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
24334 <blockquote
><p
>
24335 arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
24336 epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
24337 fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
24338 gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
24339 gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
24340 gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
24341 guile-
1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
24342 libavahi-ui0 libbind9-
50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-
11 libcdio7
24343 libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
24344 libedata-cal1.2-
6 libedataserver1.2-
9 libeel2-
2.20 libepc-
1.0-
1
24345 libepc-ui-
1.0-
1 libexchange-storage1.2-
3 libfaad0 libgadu3
24346 libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-
3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
24347 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-
0 libgksuui1.0-
1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-
2
24348 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-
1 libgnomeprint2.2-
0
24349 libgnomeprintui2.2-
0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-
1.0-
0
24350 libgtkhtml2-
0 libgtksourceview1.0-
0 libgtksourceview2.0-
0
24351 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
24352 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
24353 libmagick++
10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
24354 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
24355 libnm-util0 libopal-
2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-
10 libpisock9
24356 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-
1.10.10 libraw1394-
8
24357 libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-
8
24358 libspeexdsp1 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libsvga1
24359 libswfdec-
0.6-
90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
24360 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
24361 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
24362 sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
24363 totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
24364 </p
></blockquote
>
24366 <p
>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p
>
24368 <blockquote
><p
>
24369 gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
24370 </p
></blockquote
>
24372 <p
>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p
>
24374 <blockquote
><p
>
24376 </p
></blockquote
>
24378 <p
>This is for KDE:
</p
>
24380 <p
>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p
>
24382 <blockquote
><p
>
24383 autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-
4.3 dcoprss
24384 edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
24385 ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
24386 gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
24387 kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
24388 kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
24389 kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
24390 kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
24391 kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
24392 kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
24393 kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
24394 kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
24395 killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
24396 kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
24397 ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42
.0
24398 libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
24399 libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
24400 libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
24401 libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
24402 libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
24403 libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
24404 libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
24405 libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
24406 libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
24407 lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
24408 openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
24409 parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
24410 pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
24411 speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
24412 ttf-sazanami-gothic
24413 </p
></blockquote
>
24415 <p
>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p
>
24417 <blockquote
><p
>
24418 amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
24419 dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
24420 kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
24421 kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
24422 keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
24423 kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
24424 kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
24425 klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
24426 kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
24427 kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
24428 kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
24429 ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
24430 ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
24431 kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
24432 kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
24433 libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
24434 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-
0 libbind9-
50 libbluetooth2
24435 libboost-python1.34
.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
24436 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
24437 libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-
0 libicu38
24438 libiec61883-
0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
24439 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
24440 libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
24441 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
24442 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
24443 libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
24444 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
24445 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-
8 librss1 libsensors3
24446 libsmbios2 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libswfdec-
0.6-
90
24447 libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
24448 mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
24449 texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
24450 ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
24451 </p
></blockquote
>
24453 <p
>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p
>
24455 <blockquote
><p
>
24456 dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
24457 kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
24458 kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
24459 kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
24460 netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
24461 xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
24462 xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
24463 </p
></blockquote
>
24465 <p
>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p
>
24467 <blockquote
><p
>
24468 kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
24469 </p
></blockquote
>
24474 <title>Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd
</title>
24475 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html
</link>
24476 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html
</guid>
24477 <pubDate>Sat,
20 Nov
2010 07:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
24478 <description><p
>Answering
24479 <a href=
"http://www.listware.net/
201011/gnash-dev/
67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html
">the
24480 call from the Gnash project
</a
> for
24481 <a href=
"http://www.gnashdev.org:
8010">buildbot
</a
> slaves to test the
24482 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
24483 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
24484 Debian/Squeeze. I hope this can help the developers in getting new
24485 releases out more often.
</p
>
24487 <p
>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
24488 I have considered setting up a
<a
24489 href=
"http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/
">Debian/kfreebsd
</a
>
24490 machine as well. I have also considered using the kfreebsd
24491 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the
5
24492 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video. Because of this, I
24493 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
24494 kfreebsd. Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
24495 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
24496 screen at random locations). Have not gotten very far with the
24497 testing. Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
24498 fatal problem. Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
24499 useful as a file server for NUUG. Will try to find time to set up a
24500 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.
</p
>
24505 <title>Debian in
3D
</title>
24506 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html
</link>
24507 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html
</guid>
24508 <pubDate>Tue,
9 Nov
2010 16:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
24509 <description><p
><img src=
"http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/
23/e0/c4/f9/
2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg
"></p
>
24511 <p
>3D printing is just great. I just came across this Debian logo in
24513 <a href=
"http://blog.thingiverse.com/
2010/
11/
09/participatory-branding/
">the
24514 thingiverse blog
</a
>.
</p
>
24519 <title>Making room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
</title>
24520 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_room_on_the_Debian_Edu_Sqeeze_DVD.html
</link>
24521 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_room_on_the_Debian_Edu_Sqeeze_DVD.html
</guid>
24522 <pubDate>Sun,
7 Nov
2010 11:
45:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
24523 <description><p
>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
24524 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux
</a
> DVD, which is
24525 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
24526 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard. Even
24527 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
24528 working using this DVD.
</p
>
24530 <p
>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
24531 installing recommended packages by default. We want the same set of
24532 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
24533 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD. I created
24534 a patch for debian-cd in
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
601203">BTS
24535 report #
601203</a
> to do this, and since this change was applied to
24536 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.
</p
>
24538 <p
>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
24539 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
24540 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
24541 Debian archive.
</p
>
24543 <p
>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
24544 were using most space. A few large packages are well know;
24545 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont. But I also
24546 discovered that lilypond used
106 MiB and fglrx-driver used
53 MiB.
24547 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
24548 when looking a bit closer I discovered that
99 MiB of the
106 MiB were
24549 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
24550 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
24551 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
24552 documentation. Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
24553 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
24554 free X driver should work.
</p
>
24556 <p
>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
24557 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
24558 DVD more useful again.
</p
>
24563 <title>Software updates
2010-
10-
24</title>
24564 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html
</link>
24565 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html
</guid>
24566 <pubDate>Sun,
24 Oct
2010 22:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24567 <description><p
>Some updates.
</p
>
24569 <p
>My
<a href=
"http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2
">gnash pledge
</a
> to
24570 raise money for the project is going well. The lower limit of
10
24571 signers was reached in
24 hours, and so far
13 people have signed it.
24572 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
24573 how far we can get before the time limit of December
24 is reached.
24576 <p
>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
24577 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
24578 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
24580 <a href=
"http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html
">kcov
</a
>,
24581 and can be used using
<tt
>kcov
&lt;directory
&gt;
&lt;binary
&gt;
</tt
>.
24582 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
24583 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
24584 libglib2.0-dev. Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
24585 solvable. I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.
</p
>
24587 <p
>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for
<a
24588 href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2010/
10/msg00002.html
">a
24589 new alpha release of Debian Edu
</a
>, and just published the second
24590 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
24591 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux
</a
>
24592 release. Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
24593 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
24594 client servers and diskless workstations. A nice touch added
24595 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
24596 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.
</p
>
24601 <title>Pledge for funding to the Gnash project to get AVM2 support
</title>
24602 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pledge_for_funding_to_the_Gnash_project_to_get_AVM2_support.html
</link>
24603 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pledge_for_funding_to_the_Gnash_project_to_get_AVM2_support.html
</guid>
24604 <pubDate>Tue,
19 Oct
2010 14:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24605 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.getgnash.org/
">The Gnash project
</a
> is the
24606 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
24607 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
24608 funding has dried up. I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
24609 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
24610 AVM2 flash files.
</p
>
24612 <p
>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
24613 <a href=
"http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2
">a pledge
</a
> with the
24614 following text:
</P
>
24616 <p
><blockquote
>
24618 <p
>"I will pay
100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
24619 only if
10 other people will do the same.
"</p
>
24621 <p
>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer
</p
>
24623 <p
>Deadline to sign up by:
24th December
2010</p
>
24625 <p
>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
24626 format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
24627 web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
24628 format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
24629 days. The project web page is available from
24630 http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
24631 of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
24632 the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.
</p
>
24634 <p
>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
24635 time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
24636 to get this to happen.
</p
>
24638 <p
>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
24639 <a href=
"http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/
32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/
32</a
> .
</p
>
24641 </blockquote
></p
>
24643 <p
>I hope you will support this effort too. I hope more than
10
24644 people will participate to make this happen. The more money the
24645 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
24651 <title>First version of a Perl library to control the Spykee robot
</title>
24652 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_version_of_a_Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot.html
</link>
24653 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_version_of_a_Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot.html
</guid>
24654 <pubDate>Sat,
9 Oct
2010 14:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24655 <description><p
>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
24656 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
24657 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
24658 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
24659 I
've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
24660 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
24663 <p
>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
24664 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them. There are
24665 a few less important features too.
</p
>
24667 <p
>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
24668 but I never got around to releasing the current source. I decided
24669 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
24670 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.
</p
>
24672 <p
>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
24673 published the source and deb. If you got a spykee robot, grab the
24674 source or binary package:
</p
>
24676 <p
><ul
>
24677 <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
>
24678 <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
>
24679 <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
>
24680 </ul
></p
>
24682 <p
>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
24683 please let me know.
</p
>
24688 <title>Links for
2010-
10-
03</title>
24689 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html
</link>
24690 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html
</guid>
24691 <pubDate>Sun,
3 Oct
2010 22:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24692 <description><p
><ul
>
24694 <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
24695 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly
</a
></li
>
24697 <li
>Scanner looking under clothes
24698 <a href=
"http://www.dagbladet.no/
2010/
10/
03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/
13667192/
">has
24699 already been misused at Heathrow
</a
>.
</li
>
24701 <li
><a href=
"http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell
">Landell
24702 Webcasting
</a
> - interesting alternative for
24703 <ahref=
"http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/
">DVSwitch
</a
> with
24706 </ul
></p
>
24711 <title>Terms of use for video produced by a Canon IXUS
130 digital camera
</title>
24712 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html
</link>
24713 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html
</guid>
24714 <pubDate>Thu,
9 Sep
2010 23:
55:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24715 <description><p
>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
24716 camera, a Canon IXUS
130. It was instructive and very disturbing to
24717 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
24718 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
24719 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
24720 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway. What is the
24721 problem, you might ask? It is software patents, MPEG-
4, H
.264 and the
24722 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
24723 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
24725 <p
>On page
27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
24729 <p
>This product is licensed under AT
&T patents for the MPEG-
4 standard
24730 and may be used for encoding MPEG-
4 compliant video and/or decoding
24731 MPEG-
4 compliant video that was encoded only (
1) for a personal and
24732 non-commercial purpose or (
2) by a video provider licensed under the
24733 AT
&T patents to provide MPEG-
4 compliant video.
</p
>
24735 <p
>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-
4
24736 standard.
</p
>
24737 </blockquote
>
24739 <p
>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
24740 (MPEG-
4/H
.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
24741 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
24742 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.
</p
>
24744 <p
>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
24746 "<a href=
"http://www.osnews.com/story/
23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA
">Why
24747 Our Civilization
's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
24748 MPEG-LA
</a
>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
24749 "<a href=
"http://webmink.com/
2010/
09/
03/h-
264-and-foss/
">H
.264 Is Not
24750 The Sort Of Free That Matters
</a
>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
24751 the issue. The solution is to support the
24752 <a href=
"http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition
">free and
24753 open standards
</a
> for video, like
<a href=
"http://www.theora.org/
">Ogg
24754 Theora
</a
>, and avoid MPEG-
4 and H
.264 if you can.
</p
>
24759 <title>Some notes on Flash in Debian and Debian Edu
</title>
24760 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html
</link>
24761 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html
</guid>
24762 <pubDate>Sat,
4 Sep
2010 10:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24763 <description><p
>In the
<a href=
"http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote
">Debian
24764 popularity-contest numbers
</a
>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
24765 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian. The sixth
24766 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla. This is a clear indication that
24767 working flash is important for Debian users. Around
10 percent of the
24768 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
24769 installed.
</p
>
24771 <p
>In the report written by Lars Risan in August
2008
24772 («
<a href=
"http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile
&do=view
&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf
">Skolelinux
24773 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
24774 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs
</a
>»), one of the most important problems
24775 schools experienced with
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian
24776 Edu/Skolelinux
</a
> was the lack of working Flash. A lot of educational
24777 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
24778 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
24779 good reason to stay with Windows.
</p
>
24781 <p
>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
24782 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
24783 everything you told him but could work fairly well. This was a
24784 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
24785 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
24786 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
24787 example Internet Explorer
6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
24788 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
24789 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
24790 pages they want to visit.
</p
>
24792 <p
>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
24793 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
24794 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
24795 Video to working out of the box. For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
24796 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
24797 the new release
0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
24798 unstable. The new version work with more sites that version
0.8.7.
24799 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
24800 release team have not had time to reply to it yet. I hope they agree
24801 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
24802 accept the new package into Squeeze.
</p
>
24807 <title>My first perl GUI application - controlling a Spykee robot
</title>
24808 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_first_perl_GUI_application___controlling_a_Spykee_robot.html
</link>
24809 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_first_perl_GUI_application___controlling_a_Spykee_robot.html
</guid>
24810 <pubDate>Wed,
1 Sep
2010 21:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24811 <description><p
>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application. The last few
24812 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
24813 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
24814 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
24815 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
24816 allow me to drive the robot around. I picked PerlQt as I have had
24817 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
24818 browsing the web for examples. Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
24819 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
24820 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
24821 libqt-perl. Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
24822 drive around.
</p
>
24824 <p
>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
24825 controlling the robot. Here is an small example on how to use it:
</p
>
24827 <p
><pre
>
24829 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[
0]} = $_[
1]});
24830 my $host = (keys %robot)[
0];
24831 my $spykee = Spykee-
>new();
24832 $spykee-
>contact($host,
"admin
",
"admin
");
24833 $spykee-
>left();
24835 $spykee-
>right();
24837 $spykee-
>forward();
24839 $spykee-
>back();
24841 $spykee-
>stop();
24842 </pre
></p
>
24844 <p
>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
24845 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
24846 implement the protocol used by the robot. I
've implemented several of
24847 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
24848 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote. First I
24849 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
24850 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
24851 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
24852 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
24853 going. :).
</p
>
24855 <p
>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
24856 where to make it available first. I will add a link to
24857 <a href=
"http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/
">the NUUG wiki
</a
> for
24858 those that want to check back later to find it.
</p
>
24863 <title>Broken hard link handling with sshfs
</title>
24864 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html
</link>
24865 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html
</guid>
24866 <pubDate>Mon,
30 Aug
2010 19:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24867 <description><p
>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
24868 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html
">previous
24869 post about sshfs
</a
>. He reported another problem with sshfs. It
24870 fail to handle hard links properly. A simple way to spot this is to
24871 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree. These should have
24872 a link count
>1, but on sshfs the count is
1. I just tested to see
24873 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:
</p
>
24877 ln: creating hard link `bar
' =
> `foo
': Function not implemented
24881 <p
>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
24882 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
24883 avoid surprised unix programs. Not as useful as working file locking
24884 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
24885 nevertheless. :)
</p
>
24887 <p
>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
24889 <a href=
"http://github.com/gebi/fs-test
">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test
</a
></p
>
24894 <title>Broken umask handling with sshfs
</title>
24895 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html
</link>
24896 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html
</guid>
24897 <pubDate>Thu,
26 Aug
2010 13:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24898 <description><p
>My file system sematics program
24899 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html
">presented
24900 a few days ago
</a
> is very useful to verify that a file system can
24901 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit. I
'm
24902 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
24903 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs. My friend
24904 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
24905 Edu, but stopped because of problems. I asked today what the problems
24906 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
24907 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
24911 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
24913 int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
24916 struct stat statbuf;
24917 if (-
1 != fstat(fd,
&statbuf)) {
24918 retval = statbuf.st_mode
& 0x1ff;
24925 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
24926 int test_umask(void) {
24927 printf(
"info: testing umask effect on file creation\n
");
24929 mode_t orig_umask = umask(
000);
24931 if (
0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode(
"foobar
",
0666))) {
24932 printf(
" error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode
666 and umask
000\n
",
24936 if (
0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode(
"foobar
",
0666))) {
24937 printf(
" error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode
666 and umask
007\n
",
24941 umask (orig_umask);
24945 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
24952 <p
>Sure enough. On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:
</p
>
24955 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
24956 info: testing symlink creation
24957 info: testing subdirectory creation
24958 info: testing fcntl locking
24959 Read-locking
1 byte from
1073741824
24960 Read-locking
510 byte from
1073741826
24961 Unlocking
1 byte from
1073741824
24962 Write-locking
1 byte from
1073741824
24963 Write-locking
510 byte from
1073741826
24964 Unlocking
2 byte from
1073741824
24965 info: testing umask effect on file creation
24968 <p
>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
24972 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
24973 info: testing symlink creation
24974 info: testing subdirectory creation
24975 info: testing fcntl locking
24976 Read-locking
1 byte from
1073741824
24977 Read-locking
510 byte from
1073741826
24978 Unlocking
1 byte from
1073741824
24979 Write-locking
1 byte from
1073741824
24980 Write-locking
510 byte from
1073741826
24981 Unlocking
2 byte from
1073741824
24982 info: testing umask effect on file creation
24983 error: Wrong file mode
644 when creating using mode
666 and umask
000
24984 error: Wrong file mode
640 when creating using mode
666 and umask
007
24987 <p
>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
24988 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
24989 directory.
</p
>
24991 <p
>Update
2010-
08-
26: Reported the issue in
24992 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
594498">BTS report #
594498</a
></p
>
24994 <p
>Update
2010-
08-
27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
24995 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
24996 <a href=
"http://github.com/gebi/fs-test
">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test
</a
>.
</p
>
25001 <title>Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent
</title>
25002 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html
</link>
25003 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html
</guid>
25004 <pubDate>Sun,
15 Aug
2010 22:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
25005 <description><p
>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
25006 <a href=
"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~
3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html
">how
25007 to crush dissent
</a
> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
25008 well. Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
25009 should go down. In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
25010 long time.
</p
>
25015 <title>No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients
</title>
25016 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html
</link>
25017 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html
</guid>
25018 <pubDate>Mon,
9 Aug
2010 20:
15:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
25019 <description><p
>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
25020 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
25021 configuration settings on the clients. I believe the work to be
25022 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
25023 generated configuration.
</p
>
25025 <p
>What is the point, you might ask? The point is to allow a Debian
25026 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
25027 without any manual configuration.
</p
>
25029 <p
>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
25030 the University of Oslo using PXE. With the PXE installation, I am
25031 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
25032 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
25033 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
25034 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret). After answering
25035 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
25036 after around
50 minutes it is done. I press enter to finish the
25037 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE. When the machine is
25038 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
25039 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
25040 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
25041 same username and password to the KDE
4.4 desktop. At no point during
25042 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
25043 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
25044 fetched via DHCP and DNS. The roaming workstation is now ready for
25047 <p
>How was this done, you might wonder? First of all, here is the
25048 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
25049 working properly out of the box:
</p
>
25052 <li
>IP address/netmask and DNS server.
</li
>
25053 <li
>Web proxy URL.
</li
>
25054 <li
>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).
</li
>
25055 <li
>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.
</li
>
25056 <li
>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)
</li
>
25057 <li
>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)
</li
>
25058 <li
>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)
</li
>
25061 <p
>(Hm, did I forget anything? Let me knew if I did.)
</p
>
25063 <p
>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
25064 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
25065 administrators to track their machines. Since yesterday, everything
25066 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
25067 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.
</p
>
25069 <p
>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
25070 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
25071 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
25072 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
25073 /etc/apt/apt.conf. I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
25074 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
25075 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
25076 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.
</p
>
25078 <p
>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
25079 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot. First the
25080 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain. If
25081 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead. If an
25082 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
25083 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
25084 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS. If there are several
25085 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
25086 LDAP subtree is used as the base. If defaultNamingContext is missing,
25087 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
25088 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
25089 such an object is used as the LDAP base. For Kerberos, a similar
25090 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
25091 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record. I
've been unable to find a way to
25092 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
25093 current DNS domain is used.
</p
>
25095 <p
>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
25096 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
25097 found. This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
25098 Oslo. A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
25099 server, but have not been implemented yet. I decided to fetch and
25100 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
25101 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
25102 log in nor the passwords required to log in. Usernames and passwords
25103 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
25104 network, and will not change as the laptop move around. For a
25105 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
25106 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much. Perhaps we
25107 should switch those to use sssd too?
</p
>
25109 <p
>The user
's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
25110 located when the user logs in for the first time. The LDAP server is
25111 consulted to look for the user
's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
25112 attribute is used if found. If it isn
't found, the home directory
25113 path fetched from NSS is used instead. Assuming the path is of the
25114 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
25115 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
25116 smb://server.domain/username. This algorithm works for both Debian
25117 edu and the University of Oslo. Perhaps there are better attributes
25118 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
25119 do for now. :)
</p
>
25121 <p
>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
25122 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
25123 more flexible than before. I suspect it will also work for thin
25124 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
25125 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
25128 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
25129 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
25131 <p
>Update
2010-
08-
09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
25132 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
25133 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name. Will have to
25134 implement it for Debian Edu. :)
</p
>
25139 <title>Testing if a file system can be used for home directories...
</title>
25140 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html
</link>
25141 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html
</guid>
25142 <pubDate>Sun,
8 Aug
2010 21:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
25143 <description><p
>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
25144 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
25145 Edu/Skolelinux machines. This was thought to be no problem, as the
25146 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
25147 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
25148 mount home directories without any problems. But, after months of
25149 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.
</p
>
25151 <p
>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
25152 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
25153 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
25154 underlying file system is a unix file system. When using a Windows
25155 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
25156 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
25157 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.
</p
>
25159 <p
>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
25160 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
25161 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
25162 it should. If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
25163 help you find your way out again. This is the fs-test.c source:
</p
>
25167 * Some tests to check the file system sematics. Used to verify that
25168 * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
25170 * License: GPL v2 or later
25172 * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
25173 * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
25176 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS
64
25177 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE
1
25178 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE
1
25180 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
25182 #include
&lt;errno.h
>
25183 #include
&lt;fcntl.h
>
25184 #include
&lt;stdio.h
>
25185 #include
&lt;string.h
>
25186 #include
&lt;stdlib.h
>
25187 #include
&lt;sys/file.h
>
25188 #include
&lt;sys/stat.h
>
25189 #include
&lt;sys/types.h
>
25190 #include
&lt;unistd.h
>
25194 * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
25195 * package and linking with -lsqlite3. A more low level test is
25197 * See also
&lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5
>.
25199 #include
&lt;sqlite3.h
>
25200 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS \
25201 "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT );
"
25202 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
25204 char *name =
"testsqlite.db
";
25207 int rc = sqlite3_open(name,
&db);
25209 printf(
"error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n
", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
25214 /* create tables */
25215 rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,
0,
&zErrMsg);
25216 if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
25217 printf(
"error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n
", zErrMsg);
25221 printf(
"info: sqlite worked\n
");
25225 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
25228 * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3. This
25229 * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows
2003. This is
25230 * done in the sqlite3 library.
25232 *
&lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/
2001-
08/msg00854.html
> and the
25233 * POSIX specification
25234 *
&lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/
009695399/functions/fcntl.html
>.
25236 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
25238 char *name =
"testsqlite.db
";
25240 int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE,
0644);
25241 printf(
"info: testing fcntl locking\n
");
25243 fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
25244 fl.l_pid = getpid();
25245 printf(
" Read-locking
1 byte from
1073741824");
25246 fl.l_start =
1073741824;
25248 fl.l_type = F_RDLCK;
25249 if (
0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK,
&fl) ) printf(
" - error!\n
"); else printf(
"\n
");
25251 printf(
" Read-locking
510 byte from
1073741826");
25252 fl.l_start =
1073741826;
25254 fl.l_type = F_RDLCK;
25255 if (
0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK,
&fl) ) printf(
" - error!\n
"); else printf(
"\n
");
25257 printf(
" Unlocking
1 byte from
1073741824");
25258 fl.l_start =
1073741824;
25260 fl.l_type = F_UNLCK;
25261 if (
0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK,
&fl) ) printf(
" - error!\n
"); else printf(
"\n
");
25263 printf(
" Write-locking
1 byte from
1073741824");
25264 fl.l_start =
1073741824;
25266 fl.l_type = F_WRLCK;
25267 if (
0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK,
&fl) ) printf(
" - error!\n
"); else printf(
"\n
");
25269 printf(
" Write-locking
510 byte from
1073741826");
25270 fl.l_start =
1073741826;
25272 if (
0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK,
&fl) ) printf(
" - error!\n
"); else printf(
"\n
");
25274 printf(
" Unlocking
2 byte from
1073741824");
25275 fl.l_start =
1073741824;
25277 fl.l_type = F_UNLCK;
25278 if (
0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK,
&fl) ) printf(
" - error!\n
"); else printf(
"\n
");
25285 * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
25286 * below them. This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
25287 * Mounting with option
'sync
' seem to solve this problem while
25288 * slowing down file operations.
25290 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
25292 char *path = strdup(
"test
");
25293 char *dirs[LEVELS];
25295 printf(
"info: testing subdirectory creation\n
");
25296 for (level =
0; level
&lt; LEVELS; level++) {
25297 char *newpath = NULL;
25298 if (-
1 == mkdir(path,
0777)) {
25299 printf(
" error: Unable to create directory
'%s
': %s\n
",
25300 path, strerror(errno));
25303 asprintf(
&newpath,
"%s/%s
", path,
"test
");
25311 * Test if symlinks can be created. This was a problem detected with
25314 int test_symlinks(void) {
25315 printf(
"info: testing symlink creation\n
");
25316 unlink(
"symlink
");
25317 if (-
1 == symlink(
"file
",
"symlink
"))
25318 printf(
" error: Unable to create symlink\n
");
25322 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
25323 printf(
"Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n
");
25325 test_subdirectory_creation();
25327 test_sqlite_open();
25328 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
25329 test_gcompris_locking();
25334 <p
>When everything is working, it should print something like
25338 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
25339 info: testing symlink creation
25340 info: testing subdirectory creation
25341 info: sqlite worked
25342 info: testing fcntl locking
25343 Read-locking
1 byte from
1073741824
25344 Read-locking
510 byte from
1073741826
25345 Unlocking
1 byte from
1073741824
25346 Write-locking
1 byte from
1073741824
25347 Write-locking
510 byte from
1073741826
25348 Unlocking
2 byte from
1073741824
25351 <p
>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
25352 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
25353 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
25354 the read-only lock (while Windows do not). Another was a bug in the
25355 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
25356 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
25357 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
25358 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.
</p
>
25360 <p
>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
25363 <p
>Update
2010-
08-
27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
25364 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
25365 <a href=
"http://github.com/gebi/fs-test
">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test
</a
>.
</p
>
25370 <title>Autodetecting Client setup for roaming workstations in Debian Edu
</title>
25371 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Autodetecting_Client_setup_for_roaming_workstations_in_Debian_Edu.html
</link>
25372 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Autodetecting_Client_setup_for_roaming_workstations_in_Debian_Edu.html
</guid>
25373 <pubDate>Sat,
7 Aug
2010 14:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
25374 <description><p
>A few days ago, I
25375 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html
">tried
25376 to install
</a
> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
25377 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
25378 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
25379 university infrastructure. It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
25380 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
25381 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
25382 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
25383 around it. Now I am a huge step further along that road.
</p
>
25385 <p
>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
25386 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
25387 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
25388 servers for Kerberos authentication. All this without any
25389 configuration at all during installation. My users home directory got
25390 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
25391 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured. In addition to
25392 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
25393 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
25394 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf. Iceweasel and KDE is
25395 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
25396 a proxy when at the university network. If the machine is moved to a
25397 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
25398 gave it a IP address.
</p
>
25400 <p
>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
25401 entry ldap.$domain. If this do not exist, it look for the
25402 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
25403 server. Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
25404 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
25405 pick the first one as the LDAP base. For Kerberos, a similar
25406 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
25407 uppercase version of $domain.
</p
>
25409 <p
>So, what is not working, you might ask. SMB mounting my home
25410 directory do not work. No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
25411 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
25412 the cause. These are not properly configured during installation, and
25413 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
25414 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(
</p
>
25416 <p
>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
25417 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
25418 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
25419 authentication. It should also work out of the box in a Active
25420 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
25421 with UID and GID values.
</p
>
25423 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
25424 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
25429 <title>Debian Edu roaming workstation - at the university of Oslo
</title>
25430 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html
</link>
25431 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html
</guid>
25432 <pubDate>Tue,
3 Aug
2010 23:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
25433 <description><p
>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
25434 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
25435 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
25436 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
25437 infrastructure. In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
25438 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
25441 <p
>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
25442 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
25443 /etc/mklocaluser.d/
20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
25444 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
25445 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
25446 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
25447 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
25450 <p
>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
25451 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
25452 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
25453 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
25454 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
25455 university servers.
</p
>
25457 <p
>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
25458 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
25459 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
25460 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
25461 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
25467 <title>Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery
</title>
25468 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html
</link>
25469 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html
</guid>
25470 <pubDate>Tue,
27 Jul
2010 23:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
25471 <description><p
>I discovered this while doing
25472 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html
">automated
25473 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze
</a
>. A few packages
25474 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
25475 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
25476 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.
</p
>
25478 <p
>An example is from todays
25479 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-
20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt
">upgrade
25480 of KDE using aptitude
</a
>. In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
25481 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade. The cause is simple. If a
25482 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
25483 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
25484 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
25485 because its dependencies are unavailable.
</p
>
25487 <p
>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:
</p
>
25489 <blockquote
><pre
>
25490 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
25491 perl-modules depends on perl (
>=
5.10.1-
1); however:
25492 Version of perl on system is
5.10.0-
19lenny
2.
25493 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
25494 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
25495 </pre
></blockquote
>
25497 <p
>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
25498 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
527917">reported as a bug
</a
>, and will
25499 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
25500 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
25501 failures. Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
25502 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
25503 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
25504 of dependency loops.
</p
>
25507 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/
2010/
06/msg00116.html
">the
25508 tireless effort by Bill Allombert
</a
>, the number of circular
25510 <a href=
"http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html
">left in Debian
25511 is dropping
</a
>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)
</p
>
25513 <p
>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
25514 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
590605">update-notifier
</a
> and
25515 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
590604">different behaviour
</a
> between
25516 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
25517 dependency. Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
25523 <title>First Debian Edu test release (alpha0) based on Squeeze is released
</title>
25524 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu_test_release__alpha0__based_on_Squeeze_is_released.html
</link>
25525 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu_test_release__alpha0__based_on_Squeeze_is_released.html
</guid>
25526 <pubDate>Tue,
27 Jul
2010 17:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
25527 <description><p
>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
25528 with the next Debian Edu release. Not nearly done, but one major step
25529 completed.
</p
>
25532 <p
>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
25533 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
25534 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
25535 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
25536 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
25537 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
25538 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
25539 language of choice, please let us know too.
</p
>
25541 <p
>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
25542 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
25543 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.
</p
>
25545 <p
>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
25546 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
25549 <p
>Changes compared to the lenny based version
</p
>
25552 <li
>Everything from Debian Squeeze
25554 <li
>Desktop environment KDE
4.4 =
> the new KDE desktop in
25555 combination with some new artwork
25556 <li
>Web browser Iceweasel
3.5
25557 <li
>OpenOffice.org
3.2
25558 <li
>Educational toolbox GCompris
9.3
25559 <li
>Music creator Rosegarden
10.04.2
25560 <li
>Image editor Gimp
2.6.10
25561 <li
>Virtual universe Celestia
1.6.0
25562 <li
>Virtual stargazer Stellarium
0.10.4
25563 <li
>3D modeler Blender
2.49.2 (new application)
25564 <li
>Video editor Kdenlive
0.7.7 (new application)
25565 </ul
></li
>
25566 <li
>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
25572 <li
>SMTP (sender verification)
25575 <li
>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.
</li
>
25576 <li
>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
25577 fetched from LDAP.
</li
>
25578 <li
>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.
</li
>
25579 <li
>General cleanup (not finished)
</li
>
25581 <p
>The following features are not working as they should
</p
>
25584 <li
>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
25585 scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
25586 for testing.
</li
>
25587 <li
>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
25588 and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
25589 clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.
</li
>
25590 <li
>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.
</li
>
25591 <li
>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.
</li
>
25592 <li
>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.
</li
>
25593 <li
>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
25594 netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.
</li
>
25595 <li
>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
25596 some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
25597 jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.
</li
>
25598 <li
>Some packages lack translations. See
25599 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
25600 and help out with translations.
</li
>
25603 <p
>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use
</p
>
25606 <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
>
25607 <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
>
25608 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso
</li
>
25610 <p
>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use
</p
>
25613 <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
>
25614 <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
>
25615 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso
</li
>
25618 <p
>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
25619 get closer to the final release.
</p
>
25621 <p
>The MD5SUM of these images are
</p
>
25624 <li
>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso
</li
>
25625 <li
>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso
</li
>
25628 <p
>The SHA1SUM of these images are
</p
>
25630 <li
>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso
</li
>
25631 <li
>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso
</li
>
25633 <p
>How to report bugs:
25634 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla
</p
>
25636 <p
>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org
</p
>
25637 </blockquote
>
25642 <title>One step closer to single signon in Debian Edu
</title>
25643 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_step_closer_to_single_signon_in_Debian_Edu.html
</link>
25644 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_step_closer_to_single_signon_in_Debian_Edu.html
</guid>
25645 <pubDate>Sun,
25 Jul
2010 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
25646 <description><p
>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
25647 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
25648 Edu/Skolelinux into shape. This future version will use Kerberos for
25649 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
25650 getting rid of password questions one at the time.
</p
>
25652 <p
>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
25653 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
25654 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
25655 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server. This
25656 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
25657 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
25658 package. I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.
</p
>
25660 <p
>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
25661 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
25662 password when mounting the SMB volume. A simple click on the shortcut
25663 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
25666 <p
>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
25667 Debian Edu. We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
25668 also Samba. Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.
</p
>
25670 <p
>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
25671 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
25672 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
25673 the release. It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
25674 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
25675 time for a alpha0 release today. As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
25676 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
25677 release another day.
</p
>
25679 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
25680 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
25685 <title>OpenStreetmap one step closer to having routing on its front page
</title>
25686 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenStreetmap_one_step_closer_to_having_routing_on_its_front_page.html
</link>
25687 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenStreetmap_one_step_closer_to_having_routing_on_its_front_page.html
</guid>
25688 <pubDate>Sun,
18 Jul
2010 16:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
25689 <description><p
>Thanks to
25690 <a href=
"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~
3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home
">todays
25691 opengeodata blog entry
</a
>, I just discovered that the
25692 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
25693 <a href=
"http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT
">support
25694 for calculating routes
</a
>. The support is still experimental and
25695 only available from the development server, until more experience is
25696 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.
</p
>
25698 <p
>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
25699 was provided by
<a href=
"http://maps.cloudmade.com/
">Cloudmade
</a
>,
25700 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
25701 the issue. I
've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
25702 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
25703 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
25704 www.openstreetmap.org front page.
</p
>
25709 <title>What are they searching for - PowerDNS and ISC DHCP in LDAP
</title>
25710 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html
</link>
25711 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html
</guid>
25712 <pubDate>Sat,
17 Jul
2010 21:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
25713 <description><p
>This is a
25714 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html
">followup
</a
>
25716 <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
25718 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html
">merging
25719 all
</a
> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.
</p
>
25721 <p
>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
25722 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
25723 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server. The two
25724 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.
</p
>
25726 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
25727 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
25728 on a Debian Edu main-server. Here is a summary.
25730 <p
><strong
>powerdns
</strong
></p
>
25732 <a href=
"http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend
">Clues
25733 on how to
</a
> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
25736 <p
>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
25737 One
"strict
" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
25738 using the same LDAP objects, and a
"tree
" mode where the forward and
25739 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
25740 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
25741 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.
</p
>
25743 <p
>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
25744 base, and uses a
"base
" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
25745 "dc=tjener,dc=intern,
" to the base with a filter for
25746 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)
" for the forward entry and
25747 "dc=
2,dc=
2,dc=
0,dc=
10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,
" with a filter for
25748 "(associateddomain=
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)
" for the reverse entry. For
25749 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
25750 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
25751 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
25752 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
25753 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
25754 spfrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entries it is looking for
25755 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
25756 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
25757 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. The equivalent
25758 ldapsearch commands could look like this:
</p
>
25760 <blockquote
><pre
>
25761 ldapsearch -h ldap \
25762 -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
25763 -s base -x
'(associateddomain=tjener.intern)
' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
25764 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
25765 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
25766 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
25767 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
25769 ldapsearch -h ldap \
25770 -b dc=
2,dc=
2,dc=
0,dc=
10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
25771 -s base -x
'(associateddomain=
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)
'
25772 dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
25773 hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
25774 srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
25775 </pre
></blockquote
>
25777 <p
>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
25778 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
25779 example LDAP objects used there. In addition to these objects, the
25780 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25781 also exist.
</p
>
25783 <blockquote
><pre
>
25784 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25786 objectclass: dnsdomain
25787 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
25790 associateddomain: tjener.intern
25792 dn: dc=
2,dc=
2,dc=
0,dc=
10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25794 objectclass: dnsdomain2
25795 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
25797 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
25798 associateddomain:
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
25799 </pre
></blockquote
>
25801 <p
>In strict mode, the server behaves differently. When looking for
25802 forward DNS entries, it is doing a
"subtree
" scoped search with the
25803 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
25804 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)
" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
25805 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
25806 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
25807 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entires it also do a
25808 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is
"(arecord=
10.0.2.2)
"
25809 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
25810 modifytimestamp. In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
25811 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
25814 <p
>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
25815 like this:
</p
>
25817 <blockquote
><pre
>
25818 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
25819 '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)
' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
25820 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
25821 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
25822 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
25823 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
25825 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
25826 '(arecord=
10.0.2.2)
' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
25827 </pre
></blockquote
>
25829 <p
>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
25830 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
25831 reverse lookups.
</p
>
25833 <p
>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
25834 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
25835 need to generate a DNS reply. This make it able to work with any
25836 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.
</p
>
25838 <p
>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC
1274) and
25839 dnsdomain2 schemas. The latter is used for reverse entries like
25840 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.
</p
>
25842 <p
>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
25843 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
25844 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain). The use
25845 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
25846 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.
</p
>
25848 <p
>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
25849 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
25850 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
25851 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
25852 (zonename and relativedomainname).
</p
>
25854 <p
>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
25855 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
25856 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
25857 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
25858 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
25859 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):
</p
>
25861 <blockquote
><pre
>
25862 objectclass ( some-oid NAME
'dnsDomainAux
'
25865 MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
25866 DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
25867 TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
25868 NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
25869 A6Record $ DNAMERecord
25871 </pre
></blockquote
>
25873 <p
>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
25874 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
25875 all the attributes PowerDNS wants. I
've sent an email to the PowerDNS
25876 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
25877 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
25878 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.
</p
>
25880 <p
><strong
>ISC dhcp
</strong
></p
>
25882 <p
>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
25883 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want. This
25884 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
25885 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
25886 what is needed without having to read the source code.
</p
>
25888 <p
>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
25889 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
25890 stored. These are the relevant entries from
25891 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:
</p
>
25893 <blockquote
><pre
>
25894 ldap-base-dn
"dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
";
25895 ldap-dhcp-server-cn
"dhcp
";
25896 </pre
></blockquote
>
25898 <p
>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
25899 configuration it need. The cn
"dhcp
" is located using the given LDAP
25900 base and the filter
"(
&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))
". The
25901 search result is this entry:
</p
>
25903 <blockquote
><pre
>
25904 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25907 objectClass: dhcpServer
25908 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25909 </pre
></blockquote
>
25911 <p
>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
25912 subtree with DHCP configuration. The DHCP configuration subtree base
25913 is located using a base scope search with base
"cn=DHCP
25914 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
" and filter
25915 "(
&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))
".
25916 The search result is this entry:
</p
>
25918 <blockquote
><pre
>
25919 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25922 objectClass: dhcpService
25923 objectClass: dhcpOptions
25924 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25925 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
25926 dhcpStatements: authoritative
25927 dhcpOption: smtp-server code
69 = array of ip-address
25928 dhcpOption: www-server code
72 = array of ip-address
25929 dhcpOption: wpad-url code
252 = text
25930 </pre
></blockquote
>
25932 <p
>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time. When
25933 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
25934 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
25935 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
25936 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost. These provide options
25937 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc. Leaving out the
25938 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
25939 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
25940 related computer objects.
</p
>
25942 <p
>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
25943 of the client (
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00 in this example), using a subtree
25944 scoped search with
"cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
" as
25945 the base and
"(
&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
25946 00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00))
" as the filter. This is what a host object look
25949 <blockquote
><pre
>
25950 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25953 objectClass: dhcpHost
25954 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00
25955 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
25956 </pre
></blockquote
>
25958 <p
>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
25959 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
25960 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure. On the
25961 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
25962 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries. The latter should make
25963 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
25964 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
25965 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
25966 structural object class.
25968 <p
><strong
>Conclusion
</strong
></p
>
25970 <p
>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
25971 to which LDAP schemas to use. While its
"tree
" mode is rigid when it
25972 come to the the LDAP structure, the
"strict
" mode is very flexible,
25973 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
25974 in the configuration.
</p
>
25976 <p
>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
25977 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
25978 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
25979 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
25980 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
25981 structure.
</p
>
25983 <p
>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
25984 this might work for Debian Edu:
</p
>
25986 <blockquote
><pre
>
25988 cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
25989 cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
25990 cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
25991 cn=
10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
25992 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
25993 cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
25994 cn=
192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
25995 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
25996 ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
25997 cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
25998 </pre
></blockquote
>
26000 <P
>This is not tested yet. If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
26001 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
26002 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
26003 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.
</p
>
26005 <p
>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
26006 like this:
</p
>
26008 <blockquote
><pre
>
26009 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26012 objectClass: dhcpHost
26013 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
26014 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
26015 associateddomain: hostname.intern
26016 arecord:
10.11.12.13
26017 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00
26018 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
26019 </pre
></blockquote
>
26021 </p
>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
26022 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
26023 auxiliary object class.
</p
>
26028 <title>Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects
</title>
26029 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html
</link>
26030 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html
</guid>
26031 <pubDate>Wed,
14 Jul
2010 23:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
26032 <description><p
>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
26033 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
26034 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
26035 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
26036 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.
</p
>
26038 <p
>I
've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
26039 information finally found a solution that seem to work.
</p
>
26041 <p
>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
26042 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry. If
26043 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
26044 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
26045 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
26046 to a slave DNS server.
</p
>
26048 <p
>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
26049 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
26050 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
26051 I
've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
26052 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup. It
26053 seem to work.
</p
>
26055 <p
>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
26056 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
26057 an earlier email. The combined LDAP object will look something like
26060 <blockquote
><pre
>
26061 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26063 objectClass: dhcphost
26064 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
26065 objectclass: dnsdomainaux
26066 associateddomain: hostname.intern
26067 arecord:
10.11.12.13
26068 dhcphwaddress: ethernet
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00
26069 dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
26071 </pre
></blockquote
>
26073 <p
>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
26074 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
26075 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress. LTSP will use
26076 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.
</p
>
26078 <p
>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
26079 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
26080 outside the
"DHCP Config
" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
26081 that. If I can
't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
26082 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
26083 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
26084 content. I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
26085 might be a good place to put it.
</p
>
26087 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
26088 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
26093 <title>Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP
</title>
26094 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html
</link>
26095 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html
</guid>
26096 <pubDate>Sun,
11 Jul
2010 22:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
26097 <description><p
>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
26098 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
26099 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
26100 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.
</p
>
26102 <p
>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
26103 to get configuration from LDAP. The idea is to look up the MAC
26104 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
26105 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
26106 LTSP clients.
</p
>
26108 <p
>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
26109 in a
"computer
" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
26110 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.
</p
>
26112 <p
>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
26113 this approach. A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
26114 need to be written. Comments, suggestions, etc?
</p
>
26116 <blockquote
><pre
>
26117 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
26119 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
26121 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
26122 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
26123 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
26125 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
26126 # existence of attribute names.
26128 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
26129 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
26130 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
26132 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
26133 # configuration settings. Something like this should work:
26135 # objectclass (
1.1.2.2 NAME
'ltspClientAux
'
26138 # MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
26140 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
26141 if [
"$LDAPSERVER
" ] ; then
26142 LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
26143 for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk
'{print $
5}
'|sort -u) ; do
26144 filter=
"(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))
"
26145 ldapsearch -h
"$LDAPSERVER
" -b
"$LDAPBASE
" -v -x
"$filter
" | \
26146 grep
'^ltspConfig
' | while read attr value ; do
26147 # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
26148 attr=$(echo $attr | sed
's/^ltspConfig//i
' | tr a-z A-Z)
26149 # bass value on to clients
26150 eval
"$attr=$value; export $attr
"
26154 </pre
></blockquote
>
26156 <p
>I
'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
26157 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
26158 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
26159 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
26160 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)
</p
>
26162 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
26163 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
26165 <p
>Update
2010-
07-
17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
26166 configuration in LDAP that was created around year
2000 by
26167 <a href=
"http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html
">PC
26168 Xperience, Inc.,
2000</a
>. I found its
26169 <a href=
"http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/
">files
</a
> on a
26170 personal home page over at redhat.com.
</p
>
26175 <title>jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI
</title>
26176 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html
</link>
26177 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html
</guid>
26178 <pubDate>Fri,
9 Jul
2010 12:
55:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
26179 <description><p
>Since
26180 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html
">my
26181 last post
</a
> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
26182 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma. The java application
26183 <a href=
"http://jxplorer.org/
">jXplorer
</a
> is claimed to be capable of
26184 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
26185 authenticate using Kerberos. I have only tested the Kerberos
26186 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
26187 LDAP with my test user yet. It is
26188 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html
">available in
26189 Debian
</a
> testing and unstable at the moment. The only problem I
26190 have with it is how it handle errors. If something go wrong, its
26191 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
26192 and remove the failing query. Nothing big, but very annoying.
</p
>
26197 <title>Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop
</title>
26198 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html
</link>
26199 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html
</guid>
26200 <pubDate>Sat,
3 Jul
2010 23:
55:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
26201 <description><p
>Here is a short update on my
<a
26202 href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/
">my
26203 Debian Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrade testing
</a
>. Here is a summary of the
26204 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude. I
'm
26205 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
26206 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
26207 (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
584861">#
584861</a
> and
26208 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
585716">#
585716</a
>).
</p
>
26210 <p
>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
26211 complete list of the installed packages. Based on this I see these
26212 differences when I did a test run today. As usual, I do not really
26213 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
26214 publish the difference.
</p
>
26216 <p
>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p
>
26218 <blockquote
><p
>
26219 at-spi cpp-
4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
26220 libatspi1.0-
0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-
1-common
26221 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
26222 libgtksourceview-common libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-alsa
26223 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
26224 libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
26225 python-
4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
26226 python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
26227 </p
></blockquote
>
26229 <p
>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p
>
26231 <blockquote
><p
>
26232 bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
26233 gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
26234 libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-
50
26235 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-
11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
26236 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-
6 libedataserver1.2-
9
26237 libeel2-
2.20 libepc-
1.0-
1 libepc-ui-
1.0-
1 libexchange-storage1.2-
3
26238 libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-
3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
26239 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-
0 libgksuui1.0-
1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-
2
26240 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-
1 libgnomeprint2.2-
0
26241 libgnomeprintui2.2-
0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-
0
26242 libgtksourceview1.0-
0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
26243 libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++
10
26244 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
26245 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-
2.2 libosp5
26246 libparted1.8-
10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
26247 libpt-
1.10.10 libraw1394-
8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-
8
26248 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libswfdec-
0.6-
90 libtalloc1
26249 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
26250 libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
26251 mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
26252 </p
></blockquote
>
26254 <p
>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p
>
26256 <blockquote
><p
>
26257 gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
26258 python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
26259 xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
26260 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
26261 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
26262 xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
26263 xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
26264 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
26265 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
26266 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
26267 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
26268 xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
26269 xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
26270 xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
26271 xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
26272 xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
26273 xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
26274 xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
26275 xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
26276 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
26277 xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
26278 </p
></blockquote
>
26280 <p
>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p
>
26282 <blockquote
><p
>
26283 deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
26284 xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
26285 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
26286 </p
></blockquote
>
26288 <p
>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
26289 <a href=
"http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=
9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120
">changed
26290 in git
</a
> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
26291 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
26292 the difference somewhat.
26297 <title>Caching password, user and group on a roaming Debian laptop
</title>
26298 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Caching_password__user_and_group_on_a_roaming_Debian_laptop.html
</link>
26299 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Caching_password__user_and_group_on_a_roaming_Debian_laptop.html
</guid>
26300 <pubDate>Thu,
1 Jul
2010 11:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
26301 <description><p
>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
26302 a bit troubling. Laptops are typically used also when not connected
26303 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
26304 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
26305 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
26306 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
26307 in Debian. Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
26308 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
26309 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.
</p
>
26311 <h2
>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir
</h2
>
26313 This is the traditional method with a twist. The password caching is
26314 provided by libpam-ccreds (version
10-
4 or later is needed on
26315 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd. The directory
26316 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP. If one want to use
26317 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
26318 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal. If one is happy having a
26319 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
26320 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
26321 using libpam-mklocaluser. A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
26322 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
26323 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
568577">bug #
568577</a
> is in the
26324 archive. Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
26325 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
26326 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/. This
26327 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.
</p
>
26329 <p
>These packages need to be installed and configured
</p
>
26331 <blockquote
><pre
>
26332 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
26333 </pre
></blockquote
>
26335 <p
>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
26336 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site. Make sure the
26337 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
26338 sent in clear text to the LDAP server. I
've been unable to get TLS
26339 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
26340 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
26341 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
26342 on how to get this working.
</p
>
26344 <p
>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
26345 caching until
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
485282">bug #
485282</a
>
26346 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
26347 currently in /etc/nscd.conf. The changes are in the fields
26348 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
26349 instructions I found in the
26350 <a href=
"http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/
">LDAP for Mobile Laptops
</a
>
26351 instructions by Flyn Computing.
</p
>
26353 <blockquote
><pre
>
26355 reload-count unlimited
26358 enable-cache passwd yes
26359 positive-time-to-live passwd
2592000
26360 negative-time-to-live passwd
20
26361 suggested-size passwd
211
26362 check-files passwd yes
26363 persistent passwd yes
26365 max-db-size passwd
33554432
26366 auto-propagate passwd yes
26368 enable-cache group yes
26369 positive-time-to-live group
2592000
26370 negative-time-to-live group
20
26371 suggested-size group
211
26372 check-files group yes
26373 persistent group yes
26375 max-db-size group
33554432
26376 auto-propagate group yes
26378 enable-cache hosts no
26379 positive-time-to-live hosts
2592000
26380 negative-time-to-live hosts
20
26381 suggested-size hosts
211
26382 check-files hosts yes
26383 persistent hosts yes
26385 max-db-size hosts
33554432
26387 enable-cache services yes
26388 positive-time-to-live services
2592000
26389 negative-time-to-live services
20
26390 suggested-size services
211
26391 check-files services yes
26392 persistent services yes
26393 shared services yes
26394 max-db-size services
33554432
26395 </pre
></blockquote
>
26397 <p
>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
26398 automatically like the one provided in
26399 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
496915">bug #
496915</a
>, the file
26400 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
26401 directory service on the machine. /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
26402 look like this:
</p
>
26404 <blockquote
><pre
>
26408 hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
26414 netgroup: files ldap
26415 </pre
></blockquote
>
26417 <p
>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
26418 shadow and netgroup.
</p
>
26420 <p
>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
26421 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
26422 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
26425 <h2
>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
26426 libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir
</h2
>
26428 <p
>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
26429 problems doing proper caching, I
've seen suggestions and recipes to
26430 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
26431 LDAP database is available. I have not tested such setup, because I
26432 discovered sssd.
</p
>
26434 <h2
>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser
</h2
>
26436 <p
>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
26437 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
26438 <a href=
"https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/
">sssd
</a
> package from Redhat.
26439 It is part of the
<a href=
"http://www.freeipa.org/
">FreeIPA
</A
> project
26440 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
26441 machines. The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
26442 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
26443 libpam-ccreds. It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS. Version
26444 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
26445 in version
1.5 expected to show up later in
2010. Because the
26446 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html
">sssd package
</a
>
26447 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
26448 version
1.2 is now in testing.
26450 <p
>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
26451 roaming setup I want
</p
>
26453 <blockquote
><pre
>
26454 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
26455 </pre
></blockquote
>
26457 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
26458 <tt
>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf
</tt
>.
26460 <blockquote
><pre
>
26462 config_file_version =
2
26463 reconnection_retries =
3
26465 services = nss, pam
26469 filter_groups = root
26470 filter_users = root
26471 reconnection_retries =
3
26474 reconnection_retries =
3
26478 cache_credentials = true
26481 auth_provider = ldap
26482 chpass_provider = ldap
26484 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
26485 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26486 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
26487 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
26488 </pre
></blockquote
>
26490 <p
>I got the same problem here with certificate checking. Had to set
26491 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never
" to get it working.
</p
>
26493 <p
>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
26494 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
26495 modify it manually.
</p
>
26497 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
26498 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
26503 <title>LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI
</title>
26504 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html
</link>
26505 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html
</guid>
26506 <pubDate>Mon,
28 Jun
2010 00:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
26507 <description><p
>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
26508 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
26509 tool to browse the LDAP tree. The only one I was able to find in
26510 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
26511 <a href=
"http://luma.sourceforge.net/
">LUMA
</a
>, which has proved to
26512 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
26513 populated by default in Skolelinux. Thanks to it, I have been able to
26514 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
26515 objects. It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze. If you
26516 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)
</p
>
26518 <p
>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
26519 the BTS yet. There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
26520 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
26521 Debian submenu in KDE. I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
26522 released.
</p
>
26524 <p
>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet. I would
26525 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
26526 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet. So in the mean time, I use
26527 <a href=
"http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/
">ldapvi
</a
> for that.
</p
>
26529 <p
>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
26530 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
26532 <p
>Update
2010-
06-
29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
26533 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html
">gq
</a
> package as a
26534 useful GUI alternative. It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
26535 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze. Unless that
26536 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.
</p
>
26541 <title>Idea for a change to LDAP schemas allowing DNS and DHCP info to be combined into one object
</title>
26542 <link>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
</link>
26543 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">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
</guid>
26544 <pubDate>Thu,
24 Jun
2010 00:
35:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
26545 <description><p
>A while back, I
26546 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html
">complained
26547 about the fact
</a
> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
26548 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
26549 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.
</p
>
26551 <p
>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
26552 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
26553 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
26554 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.
</p
>
26556 <p
>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
26557 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
26558 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
26559 Debian Edu.
</p
>
26561 <p
>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
26563 <a href=
"http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-
00">DHCP
26564 schema
</a
> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
26565 available today from IETF.
</p
>
26568 --- dhcp.schema (revision
65192)
26569 +++ dhcp.schema (working copy)
26570 @@ -
376,
7 +
376,
7 @@
26571 objectclass (
2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
26572 NAME
'dhcpHost
'
26573 DESC
'This represents information about a particular client
'
26575 + SUP top AUXILIARY
26577 MAY (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
26578 X-NDS_CONTAINMENT (
'dhcpService
' 'dhcpSubnet
' 'dhcpGroup
') )
26581 <p
>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
26582 Edu/Squeeze. We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
26583 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.
</p
>
26585 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
26586 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
26591 <title>Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output
</title>
26592 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html
</link>
26593 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html
</guid>
26594 <pubDate>Wed,
16 Jun
2010 14:
55:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
26595 <description><p
>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
26596 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run. Until now,
26597 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
26598 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
26599 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
26602 <blockquote
><pre
>
26603 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
26604 tasksel --new-install
26605 </pre
></blockquote
>
26607 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
26608 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
26609 any output what so ever.
26611 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
26612 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
26613 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
26614 happen. Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
26615 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
26616 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run. I ended up using
26619 <blockquote
><pre
>
26620 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
26621 cmd=
"$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed
's/debconf-apt-progress -- //
')
"
26623 </pre
></blockquote
>
26625 <p
>The content of $cmd is typically something like
"<tt
>aptitude -q
26626 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
26627 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
26628 ~pimportant
</tt
>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
26629 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
26630 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
26631 installation.
</p
>
26633 <p
>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
26634 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
26635 like this.
</p
>
26640 <title>Officeshots taking shape
</title>
26641 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html
</link>
26642 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html
</guid>
26643 <pubDate>Sun,
13 Jun
2010 11:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
26644 <description><p
>For those of us caring about document exchange and
26645 interoperability,
<a href=
"http://www.officeshots.org/
">OfficeShots
</a
>
26646 is a great service. It is to ODF documents what
26647 <a href=
"http://browsershots.org/
">BrowserShots
</a
> is for web
26650 <p
>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
26651 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
26652 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
26653 interested in supporting the project. I helped him to navigate his
26654 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
26655 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
26656 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot. The machine is
26657 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
26658 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
26659 see how the project is doing.
</p
>
26661 <p
>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
26662 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
26663 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
26664 in
17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
26665 Windows. This is great.
</p
>
26670 <title>Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrades, removals by apt and aptitude
</title>
26671 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html
</link>
26672 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html
</guid>
26673 <pubDate>Sun,
13 Jun
2010 09:
05:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
26674 <description><p
>My
26675 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html
">testing
26676 of Debian upgrades
</a
> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I
've
26677 finally made the upgrade logs available from
26678 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/
">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/
</a
>.
26679 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
26680 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting. This time
26681 I will only focus on their removal plans.
</p
>
26683 <p
>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
26684 to remove
72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze. The
26685 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
26686 xserver-xorg-video* drivers. Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
26687 sure why. When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove
129
26688 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
26689 longer needed. Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
26690 I do not know. Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?
</p
>
26692 <p
>For KDE, apt-get want to remove
82 packages, among them kdebase
26693 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
26694 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove
192 packages, none which are
26695 too surprising.
</p
>
26697 <p
>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
26698 and avoided, and perhaps others as well. Here are the complete list
26699 of planned removals. The complete logs is available from the URL
26700 above. Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
26701 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
26702 conffile questions. No idea why. I worked around it by using
26703 '<tt
>echo
>> /proc/
<em
>pidofdpkg
</em
>/fd/
0</tt
>' to tell dpkg to
26704 continue.
</p
>
26706 <p
><b
>apt-get gnome
72</b
>
26707 <br
>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
26708 gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
26709 iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-
1-
0
26710 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
26711 nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
26712 serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
26713 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
26714 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
26715 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
26716 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
26717 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
26718 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
26719 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
26720 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
26721 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
26722 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
26723 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
26724 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
26725 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
26726 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
26727 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
26728 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
26729 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
26730 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
26731 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
26732 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
26733 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
26734 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-
1.9
26735 xulrunner-
1.9-gnome-support
</p
>
26737 <p
><b
>aptitude gnome
129</b
>
26739 <br
>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-
4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
26740 djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
26741 gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
26742 gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
26743 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
26744 libcamel1.2-
11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
26745 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-
9 libeel2-
2.20
26746 libeel2-data libepc-
1.0-
1 libepc-ui-
1.0-
1 libfaad0 libgail-common
26747 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-
3 libgda3-common libgdl-
1-
0 libgdl-
1-common
26748 libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-
0 libgksuui1.0-
1 libgmyth0
26749 libgnomecups1.0-
1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-
0
26750 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-
0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
26751 libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-
0
26752 libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-
0 libgucharmap6
26753 libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++
10
26754 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
26755 libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-
2.2
26756 libosp5 libparted1.8-
10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-
1.10.10
26757 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-
8
26758 libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-
8 libssh2-
1
26759 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libswfdec-
0.6-
90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
26760 libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
26761 libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
26762 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
26763 openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
26764 python-
4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
26765 python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
26766 python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
26767 swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
26768 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
26769 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
26772 <p
><b
>apt-get kde
82</b
>
26774 <br
>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
26775 kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
26776 kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
26777 kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
26778 kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
26779 libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
26780 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
26781 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
26782 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
26783 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
26784 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
26785 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
26786 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
26787 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
26788 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
26789 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
26790 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
26791 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
26792 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
26793 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
26794 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
26795 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
26796 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
26797 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
26798 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
26799 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
26800 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
26801 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-
1.9</p
>
26803 <p
><b
>aptitude kde
192</b
>
26804 <br
>bluez-utils cpp-
4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
26805 djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
26806 ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
26807 kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
26808 kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
26809 kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
26810 kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
26811 kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
26812 kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
26813 kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
26814 kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
26815 klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
26816 kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
26817 krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
26818 ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
26819 kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
26820 kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
26821 libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
26822 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-
0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
26823 libboost-python1.34
.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
26824 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
26825 libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-
0
26826 libicu38 libiec61883-
0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
26827 libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
26828 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
26829 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
26830 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
26831 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-
8 libsmbios2
26832 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
26833 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
26834 libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
26835 openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
26836 superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
26837 texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
26838 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
26839 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
26840 xulrunner-
1.9</p
>
26846 <title>Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze
</title>
26847 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html
</link>
26848 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html
</guid>
26849 <pubDate>Fri,
11 Jun
2010 22:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
26850 <description><p
>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
26851 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly. A few bugs
26852 have been discovered and reported in the process
26853 (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
585410">#
585410</a
> in nagios3-cgi,
26854 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
584879">#
584879</a
> already fixed in
26855 enscript and
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
584861">#
584861</a
> in
26856 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
26857 am working on a script to automate the test.
</p
>
26859 <p
>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
26860 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
26861 it. To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
26862 script is inserted. To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
26863 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
26864 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).
</p
>
26866 <p
>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
26867 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
26868 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
26869 is created. The bug report
26870 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
566000">#
566000</a
> make me suspect
26871 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
26872 to make sure the upgrade go well. Testing on virtual and real
26873 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
26874 do the trick in such settings anyway. This is a
26875 <a href=
"http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-
26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-
804130/
">known
26876 issue
</a
> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
26877 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
26878 working with old kernels or something like that. I really wish the
26879 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
26880 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
26881 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
26882 Debian Squeeze.
</p
>
26884 <p
>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades. This test
26885 script, which I call
<tt
>upgrade-test
</tt
> for now, is doing the
26888 <blockquote
><pre
>
26892 if [
"$
1" ] ; then
26901 exec
&lt; /dev/null
26903 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
26904 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
26906 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
26907 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
26908 cat
> $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
&lt;
&lt;EOF
26912 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
26914 umount $tmpdir/proc
26916 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
26917 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
26918 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
26920 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
26922 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger. It need the test scripts
26923 # to return the correct answers.
26924 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
26925 chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
26927 # Include the desktop and laptop task
26928 for test in desktop laptop ; do
26929 echo
> $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
&lt;
&lt;EOF
26933 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
26936 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
26937 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
26938 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
26939 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
26941 echo deb $mirror $to main
> $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
26942 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
26943 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
26944 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
26946 </pre
></blockquote
>
26948 <p
>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
26949 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
26950 differently so far. I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
26951 regularly and post the result on the web. The Gnome upgrade currently
26952 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
26953 kdebase-workspace-data
</p
>
26955 <p
>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
26956 (KDE
167 KiB, Gnome
516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
26957 post, so I will refrain from trying. I can report that for Gnome,
26958 aptitude report
760 packages upgraded,
448 newly installed,
129 to
26959 remove and
1 not upgraded and
1024MB need to be downloaded while for
26960 KDE the same numbers are
702 packages upgraded,
507 newly installed,
26961 193 to remove and
0 not upgraded and
1117MB need to be downloaded
</p
>
26963 <p
>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
26964 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
26965 booting without a hitch. Was unsure if there were still bugs with
26966 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
26967 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
26968 packages.
</p
>
26973 <title>Upstart or sysvinit - as init.d scripts see it
</title>
26974 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html
</link>
26975 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html
</guid>
26976 <pubDate>Sun,
6 Jun
2010 23:
55:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
26977 <description><p
>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
26978 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
26979 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd. The packages with such
26980 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
26981 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart. Because of
26982 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
26983 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.
</p
>
26985 <p
>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
26986 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
26987 COLUMNS):
</p
>
26989 <blockquote
><pre
>
26995 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
26997 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
26998 </pre
></blockquote
>
27000 <p
>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
27003 <blockquote
><pre
>
27004 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-
2.88
27009 </pre
></blockquote
>
27011 <p
>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
27012 sysvinit are not set by upstart. Not sure if it is intentional or not
27013 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.
</p
>
27015 <p
>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
27016 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
27022 <title>A manual for standards wars...
</title>
27023 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html
</link>
27024 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html
</guid>
27025 <pubDate>Sun,
6 Jun
2010 14:
15:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27026 <description><p
>Via the
27027 <a href=
"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~
3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-
10.html
">blog
27028 of Rob Weir
</a
> I came across the very interesting essay named
27029 <a href=
"http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf
">The Art of
27030 Standards Wars
</a
> (PDF
25 pages). I recommend it for everyone
27031 following the standards wars of today.
</p
>
27036 <title>Sitesummary tip: Listing computer hardware models used at site
</title>
27037 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html
</link>
27038 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html
</guid>
27039 <pubDate>Thu,
3 Jun
2010 12:
05:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27040 <description><p
>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
27041 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
27042 information extracted from each machine. The script to do so is
27043 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
27044 the Skolelinux build servers:
</p
>
27046 <blockquote
><pre
>
27047 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
27049 Dell Computer Corporation
1
27052 eserver xSeries
345 -[
8670M1X]-
1
27056 </pre
></blockquote
>
27058 <p
>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
27059 provided in each machine. Here there are Intel machines without model
27060 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
27061 machines listed as [no-dmi-info]. One can add -l as a command line
27062 option to list the individual machines.
</p
>
27064 <p
>A larger list is
27065 <a href=
"http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/
">available from the the
27066 city of Narvik
</a
>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
27067 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly. In their report there
27068 are ~
1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
27069 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
27070 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
27071 collector.
</p
>
27076 <title>KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?
</title>
27077 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html
</link>
27078 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html
</guid>
27079 <pubDate>Tue,
1 Jun
2010 17:
05:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27080 <description><p
>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
27081 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled. The
27082 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
27083 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
27086 <p
>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
27087 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
583312">#
583312</a
> initially filed
27088 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
27089 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
27090 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
524751">#
524751</a
> initially filed against
27091 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.
</p
>
27093 <p
>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
27094 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
27095 distribution work out of the box for these users. The nvidia driver
27096 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
27097 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
27098 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
27099 distribution that work for them. I have no idea what the solution is,
27100 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.
</p
>
27102 <p
>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.
</p
>
27107 <title>Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing
</title>
27108 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html
</link>
27109 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html
</guid>
27110 <pubDate>Thu,
27 May
2010 23:
55:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27111 <description><p
>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
27112 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
27113 issues are known and should be solved:
27115 <p
><ul
>
27117 <li
>The wicd package seen to
27118 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
508289">break NFS mounting
</a
> and
27119 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
581586">network setup
</a
> when
27120 parallel booting is enabled. No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
27121 seem to be on the case.
</li
>
27123 <li
>The nvidia X driver seem to
27124 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
583312">have a race condition
</a
>
27125 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect. The
27126 maintainer is on the case.
</li
>
27128 <li
>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
27129 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
27130 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
575080">try to switch back
</a
> to
27131 sysv-rc. One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
27132 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
27133 sysv-rc more robust. Will investigate some more and probably upload a
27134 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
27135 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.
</li
>
27137 </ul
></p
>
27139 <p
>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
27140 solvable before Squeeze is released. In addition to these there are
27141 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
27142 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.
</p
>
27144 <p
>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
27145 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
27146 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org
">the
27147 list of usertagged bugs related to this
</a
>.
</p
>
27149 <p
>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.
</p
>
27154 <title>More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer
</title>
27155 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html
</link>
27156 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html
</guid>
27157 <pubDate>Sat,
22 May
2010 21:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27158 <description><p
>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
27159 found time today to return to the project. Having to spend less time
27160 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
27161 definitely helped freeing some time.
</p
>
27163 <p
>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu. We
27164 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
27165 get disk and network controllers working. Without having these
27166 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
27167 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
27168 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
27169 an external medium is a support pain. Initially, I expected it to be
27170 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
27171 debian-installer to find and use them. This proved to be wrong.
27172 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
27173 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
27174 /cdrom/firmware/). This also proved to not work, and at this point I
27175 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
27176 going to work.
</p
>
27178 <p
>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
27179 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
27180 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
27181 packages. It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
27182 "external
" media devices. Today I changed it to also look in the
27183 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
27184 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu. I also changed it to
27185 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
27186 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
27187 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
27190 <p
>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
27191 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
27192 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
27193 run these before activating the firmware during installation. The
27194 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
27195 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.
</p
>
27197 <p
>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
27198 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
27203 <title>Pieces of the roaming laptop puzzle in Debian
</title>
27204 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html
</link>
27205 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html
</guid>
27206 <pubDate>Wed,
19 May
2010 19:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27207 <description><p
>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
27208 Edu finally entered the Debian archive. Today, the new
27209 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html
">libpam-mklocaluser
</a
>
27210 package was accepted. Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
27212 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html
">pam-python
</a
>
27213 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
27214 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html
">sssd
</a
> package
27215 passed NEW on Monday. In addition, the
27216 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html
">libpam-ccreds
</a
>
27217 package we need is in experimental (version
10-
4) since Saturday, and
27218 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.
</p
>
27220 <p
>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
27221 roaming laptops. The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
27222 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
27223 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
27224 for nscd in
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
485282">BTS report
27225 #
485282</a
> is implemented. The alternative setup is to use sssd with
27226 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
27227 care of the caching of passwords and group information.
</p
>
27229 <p
>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
27230 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
27231 problem with the server certificate. I plan to update the Debian
27232 package to version
1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
27233 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
27234 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches. Upstream is friendly and responsive,
27235 and I am sure we will find a good solution.
</p
>
27237 <p
>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
27238 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
27239 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
27240 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
27241 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information. The
27242 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
27243 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
27244 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used. To avoid confusion
27245 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
27246 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
27247 on the home directory servers.
</p
>
27249 <p
>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
27250 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
27251 is created. Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
27252 message. The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
27253 a bug in gdm. Have not investigated if there is some other message
27254 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.
</p
>
27256 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
27257 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
27262 <title>Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable
</title>
27263 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html
</link>
27264 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html
</guid>
27265 <pubDate>Fri,
14 May
2010 22:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27266 <description><p
>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
27267 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
27268 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
27269 expected, if I am to believe the
27270 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/
2010/
05/msg00122.html
">input
27271 on debian-devel@
</a
>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
27272 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
27273 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen. If serious problems are
27274 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
27275 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
27278 More information about
27279 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot
">dependency
27280 based boot sequencing
</a
> is available from the Debian wiki. It is
27281 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
27282 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:
</p
>
27284 <blockquote
><pre
>
27286 </pre
></blockquote
>
27288 <p
>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
27289 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
27290 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org
">the
27291 list of usertagged bugs related to this
</a
>.
</p
>
27296 <title>Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients
</title>
27297 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html
</link>
27298 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html
</guid>
27299 <pubDate>Fri,
14 May
2010 21:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27300 <description><p
>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
27301 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary
">sitesummary
27302 system
</a
> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
27303 network. Each machine will automatically report its status to the
27304 central server after boot and once per night. The network setup is
27305 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
27306 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines. This is useful
27307 to update the DHCP configuration.
</p
>
27309 <p
>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
27310 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary. Run
27311 this on the collector host:
</p
>
27313 <blockquote
><pre
>
27314 perl -MSiteSummary -e
'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(
" ", get_macaddresses(shift)),
"\n
"; });
'
27315 </pre
></blockquote
>
27317 <p
>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
27318 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.
</p
>
27320 <p
>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
27321 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
27322 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
27323 tables in LDAP using this information. Such tool is unfortunately not
27324 written yet.
</p
>
27329 <title>systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart
</title>
27330 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html
</link>
27331 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html
</guid>
27332 <pubDate>Thu,
13 May
2010 22:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27333 <description><p
>The last few days a new boot system called
27334 <a href=
"http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd
">systemd
</a
>
27336 <a href=
"http://
0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html
">introduced
</a
>
27338 to the free software world. I have not yet had time to play around
27339 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
27340 <a href=
"http://upstart.ubuntu.com/
">upstart
</a
>, and might prove to be
27341 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
27342 based boot system. Tollef is
27343 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
580814">in the process
</a
> of getting
27344 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work. I
27345 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
27346 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
27347 at the moment do not.
</p
>
27349 <p
>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
27350 platform support. It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
27351 some new kernel features enabled to function properly. This means
27352 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
27353 system. Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
27354 way forward.
</p
>
27356 <p
>In the mean time, based on the
27357 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/
2010/
05/msg00122.html
">input
27358 on debian-devel@
</a
> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
27359 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
27360 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
27361 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies. A
27362 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
27363 already in experimental. If all go well, Squeeze will be released
27364 with parallel booting enabled by default.
</p
>
27369 <title>Parallellizing the boot in Debian Squeeze - ready for wider testing
</title>
27370 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html
</link>
27371 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html
</guid>
27372 <pubDate>Thu,
6 May
2010 23:
25:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27373 <description><p
>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
27374 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
27375 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies. If you want
27376 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
27377 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot
">dependency
27378 based boot sequencing
</a
> is enabled, and add this line to
27379 /etc/default/rcS:
</p
>
27381 <blockquote
><pre
>
27382 CONCURRENCY=makefile
27383 </pre
></blockquote
>
27385 <p
>That is it. It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
27386 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
27387 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
27388 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts. Startpar is configured
27389 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
27390 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
27391 make this happen.
</p
>
27393 <p
>Give it a try, and see if you like the result. If some services
27394 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
27395 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
27396 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies). Report bugs and get
27397 the package maintainers to fix it. :)
</p
>
27399 <p
>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
27400 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct. I
27401 expect we will get there in Squeeze+
1, if we get manage to test and
27402 fix the remaining issues.
</p
>
27404 <p
>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
27405 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
27406 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org
">the
27407 list of usertagged bugs related to this
</a
>.
</p
>
27412 <title>Forcing new users to change their password on first login
</title>
27413 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Forcing_new_users_to_change_their_password_on_first_login.html
</link>
27414 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Forcing_new_users_to_change_their_password_on_first_login.html
</guid>
27415 <pubDate>Sun,
2 May
2010 13:
47:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27416 <description><p
>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
27417 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
27418 change the password on the first login attempt.
</p
>
27420 <p
>I
'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
27421 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account. The account
27422 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
27423 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
27424 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.
</p
>
27426 <p
>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
27427 settings in /etc/shadow:
</p
>
27429 <blockquote
><pre
>
27430 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
27431 Last password change : May
02,
2010
27432 Password expires : never
27433 Password inactive : never
27434 Account expires : never
27435 Minimum number of days between password change :
0
27436 Maximum number of days between password change :
99999
27437 Number of days of warning before password expires :
7
27439 </pre
></blockquote
>
27441 <p
>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
27442 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
27443 lowest value possible (January
1th
1970), and the maximum password age
27444 to the difference in days between that date and today. To make it
27445 simple, I went for
30 years (
30 *
365 =
10950) and January
2th (to
27446 avoid testing if
0 is a valid value).
</p
>
27448 <p
>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
27449 intended:
</p
>
27451 <blockquote
><pre
>
27452 root@tjener:~# chage -d
1 test; chage -M
10950 test
27453 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
27454 Last password change : Jan
02,
1970
27455 Password expires : never
27456 Password inactive : never
27457 Account expires : never
27458 Minimum number of days between password change :
0
27459 Maximum number of days between password change :
10950
27460 Number of days of warning before password expires :
7
27462 </pre
></blockquote
>
27464 <p
>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
27465 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
27466 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).
</p
>
27468 <p
>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
27469 sure only the user itself have the account password?
</p
>
27471 <p
>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
27472 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
27474 <p
>Update
2010-
05-
02 17:
20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
27475 shadow(
8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
27476 last password change to zero (
0) will force the password to be changed
27477 on the first login. This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
27478 I did not notice this in my initial testing. I have tested it on
27479 Squeeze, and
'<tt
>chage -d
0 username
</tt
>' do work there. I have not
27480 tested it on Lenny yet.
</p
>
27482 <p
>Update
2010-
05-
02-
19:
05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
27483 equivalent command to expire a password is
'<tt
>passwd -e
27484 username
</tt
>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
27490 <title>Thoughts on roaming laptop setup for Debian Edu
</title>
27491 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thoughts_on_roaming_laptop_setup_for_Debian_Edu.html
</link>
27492 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thoughts_on_roaming_laptop_setup_for_Debian_Edu.html
</guid>
27493 <pubDate>Wed,
28 Apr
2010 20:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27494 <description><p
>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
27495 Debian Edu. The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
27496 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
27499 <p
>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
27500 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
27501 example called Roaming Workstations. Here are my thought on this.
27502 The setup would consist of the following:
</p
>
27506 <li
>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
27507 the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
27508 the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
27509 server. This allow the user to work also when offline. The
27510 central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
27511 request, for example mounted via CIFS. It could be mounted
27512 automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
27513 and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
27514 hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
27515 request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
27516 can be used to access it when needed. Perhaps it is enough to use
27517 the fish protocol in KDE?
</li
>
27519 <li
>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
27520 authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
27521 to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
27522 to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server. This can be done using
27523 <a href=
"http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html
">libpam-ccreds
</a
>
27524 or the Fedora developed
27525 <a href=
"https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD
">System
27526 Security Services Daemon
</a
> packages.
</li
>
27528 <li
>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
27529 using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
27530 directory, using unison.
</li
>
27532 <li
>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
27533 their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
27534 the box with CUPS. For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
27535 system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
27536 implemented.
</li
>
27538 <li
>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
27539 sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.
</li
>
27541 <li
>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
27542 cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
27543 local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.
</li
>
27547 <p
>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
27548 the moment. If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
27549 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze. Some of the pieces need
27550 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
27551 (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
566718">#
566718</a
>) and nslcd (or
27552 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
27553 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
27554 when disconnected from the net. If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
27555 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.
</p
>
27557 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
27558 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
27563 <title>Great book:
"Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future
"</title>
27564 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Great_book___Content__Selected_Essays_on_Technology__Creativity__Copyright__and_the_Future_of_the_Future_.html
</link>
27565 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Great_book___Content__Selected_Essays_on_Technology__Creativity__Copyright__and_the_Future_of_the_Future_.html
</guid>
27566 <pubDate>Mon,
19 Apr
2010 17:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27567 <description><p
>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
27568 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
27569 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
27570 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
27571 book titled
"Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
27572 Copyright, and the Future of the Future
" is available with few
27573 restrictions on the web, for example from
27574 <a href=
"http://craphound.com/content/
">his own site
</a
>. I read the
27576 <a href=
"http://www.feedbooks.com/book/
2883">feedbooks
</a
> using
27577 <a href=
"http://www.fbreader.org/
">fbreader
</a
> and my N810. I
27578 strongly recommend this book.
</p
>
27583 <title>Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?
</title>
27584 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html
</link>
27585 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html
</guid>
27586 <pubDate>Wed,
14 Apr
2010 17:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27587 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20100413-kerberos/
">Yesterdays
27588 NUUG presentation
</a
> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
27589 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux. Setting up a
27590 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
27591 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
27592 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
27593 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
27594 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
27595 users and cryptographic keys instead.
</p
>
27597 <p
>A challenge will be integration and administration. Is there a
27598 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
27599 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups? With it, the
27600 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
27601 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.
</p
>
27603 <p
>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
27604 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together. Anyone know?
</p
>
27606 <p
>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
27607 Nagios. I have no idea how much work that will be to implement. We
27608 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
27609 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
27610 to work properly.
</p
>
27612 <p
>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
27613 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
27614 configuration and integration. A natural starting point would be
27615 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
27616 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
27619 <p
>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
27620 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
27621 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home. The video show show
27622 up in a few days.
</p
>
27627 <title>After
6 years of waiting, the Xreset.d feature is implemented
</title>
27628 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/After_6_years_of_waiting__the_Xreset_d_feature_is_implemented.html
</link>
27629 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/After_6_years_of_waiting__the_Xreset_d_feature_is_implemented.html
</guid>
27630 <pubDate>Sat,
6 Mar
2010 18:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
27631 <description><p
>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
27632 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
27633 when the user log out. A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
27634 package in
2004 (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
230422">#
230422</a
>),
27635 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
27636 Today, this finally paid off.
</p
>
27638 <p
>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
27639 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
27640 been updated to use this framework. Next on my agenda is to make sure
27641 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.
</p
>
27643 <p
>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
27644 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
27645 after a user. With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
27646 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
27647 framework. My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
27648 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.
<p
>
27653 <title>Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Lenny released, work continues
</title>
27654 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Lenny_released__work_continues.html
</link>
27655 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Lenny_released__work_continues.html
</guid>
27656 <pubDate>Thu,
11 Feb
2010 17:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
27657 <description><p
>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
27658 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux
</a
> was finally
27659 shipped. This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
27660 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up. Work on the first
27661 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
27662 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
27663 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.
</p
>
27665 <p
>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?
</p
>
27667 <p
>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
27668 next major release, based on Squeeze. We will try to get as many of
27669 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
27670 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.
</p
>
27675 <title>Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration
</title>
27676 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html
</link>
27677 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html
</guid>
27678 <pubDate>Wed,
27 Jan
2010 15:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
27679 <description><p
>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
27680 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
27681 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
27682 Nagios. The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
27683 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
27686 <p
>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
27687 configured as a Munin and Nagios server. In addition, it is
27688 configured to be a server for the
27689 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary
">SiteSummary
27690 system
</a
> I have written for use in Debian Edu. The SiteSummary
27691 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
27692 work. In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
27693 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
27694 computer submitting information to this collector. This allow for
27695 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
27696 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
27697 packages got etc. This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
27698 and Nagios configuration.
</p
>
27700 <p
>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
27701 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
27702 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
27703 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.
</p
>
27705 <p
>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
27706 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
27707 services detected). In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
27708 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
27709 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
27710 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
27711 the machine.
</p
>
27713 <p
>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
27714 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
27715 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
27716 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.
</p
>
27718 <p
>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
27719 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP. The system
27720 administrator need to run
"<tt
>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
27721 nagiosadmin
</tt
>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
27722 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages. After that,
27723 everything is taken care of.
</p
>
27728 <title>Relative popularity of document formats (MS Office vs. ODF)
</title>
27729 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Relative_popularity_of_document_formats__MS_Office_vs__ODF_.html
</link>
27730 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Relative_popularity_of_document_formats__MS_Office_vs__ODF_.html
</guid>
27731 <pubDate>Wed,
12 Aug
2009 15:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27732 <description><p
>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
27733 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
27734 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage. I searched using
27735 'filetype:odt
' and equvalent terms, and got these results:
</P
>
27738 <tr
><th
>Type
</th
><th
>ODF
</th
><th
>MS Office
</th
></tr
>
27739 <tr
><td
>Tekst
</td
> <td
>odt:
282000</td
> <td
>docx:
308000</td
></tr
>
27740 <tr
><td
>Presentasjon
</td
> <td
>odp:
75600</td
> <td
>pptx:
183000</td
></tr
>
27741 <tr
><td
>Regneark
</td
> <td
>ods:
26500 </td
> <td
>xlsx:
145000</td
></tr
>
27744 <p
>Next, I added a
'site:no
' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
27745 got these numbers:
</p
>
27748 <tr
><th
>Type
</th
><th
>ODF
</th
><th
>MS Office
</th
></tr
>
27749 <tr
><td
>Tekst
</td
> <td
>odt:
2480 </td
> <td
>docx:
4460</td
></tr
>
27750 <tr
><td
>Presentasjon
</td
> <td
>odp:
299 </td
> <td
>pptx:
741</td
></tr
>
27751 <tr
><td
>Regneark
</td
> <td
>ods:
187 </td
> <td
>xlsx:
372</td
></tr
>
27754 <p
>I wonder how these numbers change over time.
</p
>
27756 <p
>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
27757 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
27758 they are conduced in another country. Because of this, I did the same
27759 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
27760 search done from a machine here in Norway.
</p
>
27764 <tr
><th
>Type
</th
><th
>ODF
</th
><th
>MS Office
</th
></tr
>
27765 <tr
><td
>Tekst
</td
> <td
>odt:
129000</td
> <td
>docx:
308000</td
></tr
>
27766 <tr
><td
>Presentasjon
</td
> <td
>odp:
44200</td
> <td
>pptx:
93900</td
></tr
>
27767 <tr
><td
>Regneark
</td
> <td
>ods:
26500 </td
> <td
>xlsx:
82400</td
></tr
>
27770 <p
>And with
'site:no
':
27773 <tr
><th
>Type
</th
><th
>ODF
</th
><th
>MS Office
</th
></tr
>
27774 <tr
><td
>Tekst
</td
> <td
>odt:
2480</td
> <td
>docx:
3410</td
></tr
>
27775 <tr
><td
>Presentasjon
</td
> <td
>odp:
175</td
> <td
>pptx:
604</td
></tr
>
27776 <tr
><td
>Regneark
</td
> <td
>ods:
186 </td
> <td
>xlsx:
296</td
></tr
>
27779 <p
>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
27785 <title>ISO still hope to fix OOXML
</title>
27786 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html
</link>
27787 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html
</guid>
27788 <pubDate>Sat,
8 Aug
2009 14:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27789 <description><p
>According to
<a
27790 href=
"http://twerner.blogspot.com/
2009/
08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html
">a
27791 blog post from Torsten Werner
</a
>, the current defect report for ISO
27792 29500 (ISO OOXML) is
809 pages. His interesting point is that the
27793 defect report is
71 pages more than the full ODF
1.1 specification.
27794 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
27795 can be fixed in ISO. Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
27796 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
27797 close to solving the problems. I was part of the Norwegian committee
27798 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
27799 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.
</p
>
27801 <p
>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
27802 with the future ahead of it. We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
27803 seminar this autumn.
</p
>
27808 <title>Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing
</title>
27809 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html
</link>
27810 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html
</guid>
27811 <pubDate>Mon,
27 Jul
2009 23:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27812 <description><p
>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version
2.87dsf-
2,
27813 and the upload of insserv version
1.12.0-
10 yesterday, Debian unstable
27814 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing. This
27815 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
27816 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
27817 installation. Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
27818 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.
</p
>
27820 <p
>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
27821 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
27822 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.
</p
>
27827 <title>Taking over sysvinit development
</title>
27828 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html
</link>
27829 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html
</guid>
27830 <pubDate>Wed,
22 Jul
2009 23:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27831 <description><p
>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
27832 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
27833 take over the package and become the new upstream. The number of
27834 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
27835 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
27836 the package up to date.
</p
>
27838 <p
>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
27839 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman. About
10 days ago, I made
27840 a new upstream tarball with version number
2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
27841 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
27842 distributions. We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
27843 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge. Since the
27844 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
27845 upstream project at
<a href=
"http://savannah.nongnu.org/
">Savannah
</a
>, and continue
27846 development there. The project is registered and currently waiting
27847 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
27848 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
27849 working on the future release.
</p
>
27851 <p
>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
27852 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.
</p
>
27857 <title>Debian boots quicker and quicker
</title>
27858 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html
</link>
27859 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html
</guid>
27860 <pubDate>Wed,
24 Jun
2009 21:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27861 <description><p
>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
27862 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
27863 could find more ways to speed up the boot system. This was an Ubuntu
27865 <a href=
"https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint
">developer
27866 gathering
</a
>. It was quite productive. We also discussed the future
27867 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
27868 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
27869 asynchronous and event base. The Ubuntu approach using udev and
27870 upstart might be a good way forward. Time will show.
</p
>
27872 <p
>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
27873 process in Debian. All of these should be applied to get a quick
27878 <li
>Use dash as /bin/sh.
</li
>
27880 <li
>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
27881 clock is in UTC.
</li
>
27883 <li
>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
27884 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot
">dependency
27885 based boot sequencing
</a
>, and enable concurrent booting.
</li
>
27889 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
27890 <a href=
"http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/
">Carlos
27891 Villegas
</a
>.
27893 <p
>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
27894 unstable yesterday. When we tested it, we were able to cut
6 seconds
27895 from the boot sequence. It depend on very correct dependency
27896 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
27897 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
27898 using this.
</p
>
27900 <p
>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
27901 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
27902 startup speed as well. Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
27903 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
27904 possible to run a of them in the same process. A quick way to test
27905 this would be to enable insserv and run
'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
27906 insserv
'. Will need to test if that work. :)
</p
>
27911 <title>Two projects that have improved the quality of free software a lot
</title>
27912 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html
</link>
27913 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html
</guid>
27914 <pubDate>Sat,
2 May
2009 15:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27915 <description><p
>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
27916 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
27917 do not yet know them.
</p
>
27919 <p
>The first one is
<a href=
"http://valgrind.org/
">valgrind
</a
>, a
27920 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
27921 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run
'valgrind program
',
27922 and it will report any problems on stdout. It is even better if the
27923 program include debug information. With debug information, it is able
27924 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
27925 occurs. It can report things like
'reading past memory block in file
27926 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M
', and
27927 'using uninitialised value in control logic
'. This tool has made it
27928 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
27929 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
27931 <p
>The second one is
27932 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity
">Coverity
</a
> which is
27933 a source code checker. It is able to process the source of a program
27934 and find problems in the logic without running the program. It
27935 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
27936 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel. It is now a commercial tool
27937 and the company behind it is running
27938 <a href=
"http://www.scan.coverity.com/
">a community service
</a
> for the
27939 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
27940 their source checked for free. Several thousand defects have been
27941 found and fixed so far. It can find errors like
'lock L taken in file
27942 X line N is never released if exiting in line M
', or
'the code in file
27943 Y lines O to P can never be executed
'. The projects included in the
27944 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
27945 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.
</p
>
27947 <p
>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
27948 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
27949 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
27950 surrounded by today.
</p
>
27955 <title>No patch is not better than a useless patch
</title>
27956 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html
</link>
27957 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html
</guid>
27958 <pubDate>Tue,
28 Apr
2009 09:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27959 <description><p
>Julien Blache
27960 <a href=
"http://blog.technologeek.org/
2009/
04/
12/
214">claim that no
27961 patch is better than a useless patch
</a
>. I completely disagree, as a
27962 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
27963 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
27964 time on fixing it. No patch do not provide any of these positive
27965 properties.
</p
>
27970 <title>Recording video from cron using VLC
</title>
27971 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html
</link>
27972 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html
</guid>
27973 <pubDate>Sun,
5 Apr
2009 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
27974 <description><p
>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
27975 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net. The
27976 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
27977 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
27978 vlc. I finally found a way to do it today. I spent an hour or so
27979 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation. The
27980 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
27981 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:
</p
>
27983 <blockquote
><pre
>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
27985 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
27986 --sout=
"#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url=
'$SAVEFILE
'},dst=nodisplay}
" \
27987 --intf=dummy
</pre
></blockquote
>
27989 <p
>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
27990 duplicating the output stream to
"nodisplay
" and the file, using the
27991 dummy interface. The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
27992 sure no X interface is needed.
</p
>
27994 <p
>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
27995 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
27996 the vlc process with SIGTERM. Here is a complete script
27997 <tt
>vlc-record
</tt
> to use from
<tt
>at
</tt
> or
<tt
>cron
</tt
>:
</p
>
27999 <blockquote
><pre
>#!/bin/sh
28002 SAVEFILE=
"$
2"
28003 DURATION=
"$
3"
28004 DISPLAY= vlc -q
"$URL
" \
28005 --sout=
"#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url=
'$SAVEFILE
'},dst=nodisplay}
" \
28006 --intf=dummy
< /dev/null
> /dev/null
2>&1 &
28010 wait $pid
</pre
></blockquote
>
28015 <title>Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications
</title>
28016 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html
</link>
28017 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html
</guid>
28018 <pubDate>Mon,
30 Mar
2009 11:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
28019 <description><p
>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
28020 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure. It is the
28021 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
28022 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
28023 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
28024 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
28025 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
28026 application.
</p
>
28028 <p
>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
28029 independently of the server applications. One can even allow users to
28030 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
28031 protocol and format. In the normal case, only one client application
28032 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
28033 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
28034 blocked from doing so.
</p
>
28036 <p
>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
28037 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
28038 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
28039 requirements change.
</p
>
28041 <p
>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
28042 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
28043 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.
</p
>
28048 <title>Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering
</title>
28049 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html
</link>
28050 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html
</guid>
28051 <pubDate>Sun,
29 Mar
2009 21:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
28052 <description><p
>I
'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
28053 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering. I got a bit done tuning the
28054 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
28055 implementation avahi. It look like it could be useful for us. Almost
28056 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
28057 get to know the Skolelinux system. Walter Bender, involved in the
28058 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
28059 also helped me improve my OLPC installation. He also showed me that
28060 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
28061 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian. As a
28062 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu. We also
28063 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
28064 proved to be too hard for us. The application seem to need more work
28065 before it is ready for me. I look forward to getting home and relax
28071 <title>Time for new LDAP schemas replacing RFC
2307?
</title>
28072 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html
</link>
28073 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html
</guid>
28074 <pubDate>Sun,
29 Mar
2009 20:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
28075 <description><p
>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
28076 optimal. There is RFC
2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
28077 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC
2307bis, with
28078 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory. The RFC
28079 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
28080 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.
</p
>
28082 <p
>In
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu/Skolelinux
</a
>,
28083 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
28084 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
28085 and LTSP configuration in LDAP. These objects have a lot in common,
28086 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
28087 object per entity. For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
28088 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
28089 DNS information and another with DHCP information. The schemas
28090 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
28091 object. In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
28092 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
28093 It just do not scale. I believe it is time for a few RFC
28094 specifications to cleam up this mess.
</p
>
28096 <p
>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
28097 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
28098 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
28099 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.
</p
>
28101 <p
>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
28102 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.
</p
>
28104 <p
>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
28105 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up. Time to start a
28106 new IETF work group?
</p
>
28111 <title>Checking server hardware support status for Dell, HP and IBM servers
</title>
28112 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html
</link>
28113 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html
</guid>
28114 <pubDate>Sat,
28 Feb
2009 23:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
28115 <description><p
>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
28116 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
28117 contract expire for each server. We have a machine (and service)
28118 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
28119 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
28120 each machine. To make it easier for us to track support contract
28121 status, I
've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
28122 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
28123 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
28124 machines. I extended a perl script already being used to import
28125 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
28126 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
28127 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
28128 for the relevant machines. This make the support status information
28129 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
28130 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
28131 The result of this work documented that
27% of the machines in the
28132 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
28133 them.
27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
28134 using machines a bit longer than the
3 years a normal support contract
28135 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
28136 services. After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
28137 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
28138 them break down. When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
28139 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
28142 <p
>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
28143 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
28144 Werner Forsbring. The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
28145 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
28146 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code. I know the HTML
28147 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
28148 introduce more dependencies. This is the current incarnation:
</p
>
28153 use WWW::Mechanize;
28156 sub get_support_info {
28157 my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
28160 if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
28161 # fetch website from Dell support
28162 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
";
28163 my $webpage = get($url);
28164 return undef unless ($webpage);
28167 my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
28168 foreach my $line (@lines) {
28169 next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
28170 $line =~ s/
&lt;[^
>]+?
>/;/gm;
28171 $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$
1/;
28173 my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
28174 @f = @f[
13 .. $#f];
28175 my $lastend =
"";
28176 while ($f[
3] eq
"DELL
") {
28177 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[
0,
5,
7,
10];
28179 my $start = POSIX::strftime(
"%Y-%m-%d
",
28180 localtime(str2time($startstr)));
28181 my $end = POSIX::strftime(
"%Y-%m-%d
",
28182 localtime(str2time($endstr)));
28183 $str .=
"$type $start -
> $end
";
28184 @f = @f[
14 .. $#f];
28185 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
28187 my $today = POSIX::strftime(
"%Y-%m-%d
", localtime(time));
28188 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
28189 if ($lastend lt $today);
28191 } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
28192 my $mech = WWW::Mechanize-
>new();
28194 'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do
';
28195 $mech-
>get($url);
28197 'BODServiceID
' =
> 'NA
',
28198 'RegisteredPurchaseDate
' =
> '',
28199 'country
' =
> 'NO
',
28200 'productNumber
' =
> $productnumber,
28201 'serialNumber1
' =
> $serial,
28203 $mech-
>submit_form( form_number =
> 2,
28204 fields =
> $fields );
28205 # Next step is screen scraping
28206 my $content = $mech-
>content();
28208 $content =~ s/
&lt;[^
>]+?
>/;/gm;
28209 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
28210 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
28211 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
28213 my $today = POSIX::strftime(
"%Y-%m-%d
", localtime(time));
28215 while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
28216 my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
28217 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
28218 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
28219 my $start = POSIX::strftime(
"%Y-%m-%d
",
28220 localtime(str2time($startstr)));
28221 my $end = POSIX::strftime(
"%Y-%m-%d
",
28222 localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
28224 $str .=
"$type ($status) $start -
> $end
";
28226 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
28227 if ($end lt $today);
28229 } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
28230 # This code ignore extended support contracts.
28231 my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{
4}).+\]-/;
28232 if ($producttype
&amp;
&amp; $serial) {
28234 get(
"http://www-
947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty
&amp;brandind=
5000008&amp;Submit=Submit
&amp;type=$producttype
&amp;serial=$serial
");
28236 $content =~ s/
&lt;[^
>]+?
>/;/gm;
28237 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
28238 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
28239 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
28241 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
28242 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
28244 $str .=
"($status) -
> $end
";
28246 my $today = POSIX::strftime(
"%Y-%m-%d
", localtime(time));
28247 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
28248 if ($end lt $today);
28256 <p
>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
28257 serial numbers. The information passed in as arguments are fetched
28258 from dmidecode.
</p
>
28261 print get_support_info(
"hp.host
",
"HP ProLiant BL460c G1
",
"1234567890"
28262 "447707-B21
");
28263 print get_support_info(
"dell.host
",
"Dell Inc. PowerEdge
2950",
"1234567");
28264 print get_support_info(
"ibm.host
",
"IBM eserver xSeries
345 -[
867061X]-
",
28265 "1234567");
28268 <p
>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
28269 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)
</p
>
28271 <p
>Update
2009-
03-
06: The IBM page do not include extended support
28272 contracts, so it is useless in that case. The original Dell code do
28273 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
28279 <title>Using bar codes at a computing center
</title>
28280 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html
</link>
28281 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html
</guid>
28282 <pubDate>Fri,
20 Feb
2009 08:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
28283 <description><p
>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
28284 in our computing center. This give us a challenge in tracking the
28285 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
28286 removed. Some times the location register is not updated when a
28287 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
28288 the
"missing
" computer.
</p
>
28290 <p
>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
28291 <a href=
"http://www.libdmtx.org/
">libdmtx
</a
> to write and read bar
28292 code blocks as defined in the
28293 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix
">The Data Matrix
28294 Standard
</a
>. This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
28295 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
28296 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture. The bar code standard
28297 allow up to
2 KiB to be written in the tag. There is another project
28298 with
<a href=
"http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/
">a bar code
28299 writer written in postscript
</a
> capable of creating such bar codes,
28300 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
28303 <p
>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
28304 machines in our computing center. If both racks and computers are
28305 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
28306 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
28307 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
28308 locations, and can detect movements and removals.
</p
>
28310 <p
>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
28311 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names. Next, I
28312 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
28313 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read. This worked
28314 fairly well. If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
28315 side, all tags in the image could be read. Because of limited space
28316 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
28317 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
28318 about half the rack. I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
28319 to
60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.
</p
>
28321 <p
>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
28322 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
28323 easier automatic tracking of computers.
</p
>
28328 <title>When web browser developers make a video player...
</title>
28329 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/When_web_browser_developers_make_a_video_player___.html
</link>
28330 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/When_web_browser_developers_make_a_video_player___.html
</guid>
28331 <pubDate>Sat,
17 Jan
2009 18:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
28332 <description><p
>As part of the work we do in
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no
">NUUG
</a
>
28333 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
28334 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording. Putting a
28335 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
28336 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy. I hope this
28337 will become easier when the
&lt;video
&gt; tag is implemented in all
28338 browsers, but I am not sure. We provide the recordings in several
28339 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H
.264 and Quicktime, and want the
28340 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
28341 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
28342 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
28343 &lt;video
&gt; tag, the
&lt;object
&gt; tag, the
&lt;embed
&gt; tag and
28344 the
&lt;applet
&gt; tag. All of these take a lot of options, and
28345 finding the best options is a major challenge.
</p
>
28347 <p
>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from
<a
28348 href=
"http://labs.opera.com
">labs.opera.com
</a
>, to see how it handled
28349 a
&lt;video
&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
28350 I was not very impressed. The browser start by fetching a picture
28351 from the video stream. Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
28352 definitely very early in the recording. So far, so good. Next,
28353 instead of streaming the
76 MiB video file, it start to download all
28354 of it, but do not start to play the video. This mean I have to wait
28355 for several minutes for the downloading to finish. When the download
28356 is done, the playing of the video do not start! Waiting for the
28357 download, but I do not get to see the video? Some testing later, I
28358 discover that I have to add the controls=
"true
" attribute to be able
28359 to get a play button to pres to start the video. Adding
28360 autoplay=
"true
" did not help. I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
28361 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
28362 &lt;video
&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
28363 playing when the download is done.
</p
>
28365 <p
>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
28366 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/
">available
28367 from the nuug site
</a
>. Will have to test it with the new Firefox
28370 <p
>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature. I was unable
28371 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
28372 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video. I
28373 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)
</p
>
28378 <title>Software video mixer on a USB stick
</title>
28379 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html
</link>
28380 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html
</guid>
28381 <pubDate>Sun,
28 Dec
2008 15:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
28382 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">Norwegian Unix User Group
</a
> is
28383 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
28384 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
28385 directly with the video stream. For this, we use the
28386 <a href=
"http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/
">dvswitch
</a
> package from
28387 the Debian video team. As this require quite one computer per video
28388 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
28389 borrow laptops. And to avoid having to install extra software on
28390 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
28391 bootable USB stick. The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
28392 source, sink and mixer applications and
28393 <a href=
"http://www.kinodv.org/
">dvgrab
</a
>. To allow this setup to
28394 work without any configuration, I
've patched dvswitch to use
28395 <a href=
"http://www.avahi.org/
">avahi
</a
> to connect the various parts
28396 together. And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
28397 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
28398 with USB sources. We have not yet tested this setup in a production
28399 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
28400 video mixer in a very short time frame. We will need it for
28401 <a href=
"http://www.goopen.no/
">Go Open
2009</a
>.
</p
>
28403 <p
><a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz
">The
28404 USB image
</a
> is for a
1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
28405 larger stick as well.
</p
>
28410 <title>Devcamp brought us closer to the Lenny based Debian Edu release
</title>
28411 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html
</link>
28412 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html
</guid>
28413 <pubDate>Sun,
7 Dec
2008 12:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
28414 <description><p
>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
28415 Oslo. Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
28416 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
28417 LTSP installation. LTSP now work out of the box on the
10-network.
28418 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
28419 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box. Was working on getting the
28420 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
28421 finish it before the weekend was up.
</p
>
28423 <p
>Did not find time to look at the
4 VGA cards in one box we got from
28424 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
28425 development gathering. Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
28426 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
28427 of these cards.
</p
>
28432 <title>The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian
</title>
28433 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html
</link>
28434 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html
</guid>
28435 <pubDate>Tue,
25 Nov
2008 00:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
28436 <description><p
>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
28437 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
28438 default in Debian Edu. We need an embedded video playing plugin with
28439 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
28440 all the multimedia content available on the web. The test results and
28441 notes are available on
28442 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia
">the
28443 Debian wiki
</a
>. I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
28444 fill this need. My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
28445 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages. A lot of the MIME
28446 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
28447 video/ogg), just do not work. And simple formats like the
28448 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn
't supported by the
28449 totem and vlc plugins. I hope the situation will improve soon. No
28450 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.
</p
>
28452 <p
>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin. It seem to
28453 be the only one fitting our needs. :/
</p
>
projects / homepage.git / blob