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  13  <h1>
  14      <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  15
  16  </h1>
  17
  18 </div>
  19
  20
  21     <h3>Entries tagged "debian".</h3>
  22
  23     <div class="entry">
  24       <div class="title">
  25         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram__Appstream_and_udev_make_life_as_a_LEGO_builder_easier.html">Isenkram, Appstream and udev make life as a LEGO builder easier</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28          7th October 2016
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
  32 system</a> provide a practical and easy way to figure out which
  33 packages support the hardware in a given machine.  The command line
  34 tool <tt>isenkram-lookup</tt> and the tasksel options provide a
  35 convenient way to list and install packages relevant for the current
  36 hardware during system installation, both user space packages and
  37 firmware packages. The GUI background daemon on the other hand provide
  38 a pop-up proposing to install packages when a new dongle is inserted
  39 while using the computer.  For example, if you plug in a smart card
  40 reader, the system will ask if you want to install <tt>pcscd</tt> if
  41 that package isn't already installed, and if you plug in a USB video
  42 camera the system will ask if you want to install <tt>cheese</tt> if
  43 cheese is currently missing.  This already work just fine.</p>
  44
  45 <p>But Isenkram depend on a database mapping from hardware IDs to
  46 package names.  When I started no such database existed in Debian, so
  47 I made my own data set and included it with the isenkram package and
  48 made isenkram fetch the latest version of this database from git using
  49 http.  This way the isenkram users would get updated package proposals
  50 as soon as I learned more about hardware related packages.</p>
  51
  52 <p>The hardware is identified using modalias strings.  The modalias
  53 design is from the Linux kernel where most hardware descriptors are
  54 made available as a strings that can be matched using filename style
  55 globbing.  It handle USB, PCI, DMI and a lot of other hardware related
  56 identifiers.</p>
  57
  58 <p>The downside to the Isenkram specific database is that there is no
  59 information about relevant distribution / Debian version, making
  60 isenkram propose obsolete packages too.  But along came AppStream, a
  61 cross distribution mechanism to store and collect metadata about
  62 software packages.  When I heard about the proposal, I contacted the
  63 people involved and suggested to add a hardware matching rule using
  64 modalias strings in the specification, to be able to use AppStream for
  65 mapping hardware to packages.  This idea was accepted and AppStream is
  66 now a great way for a package to announce the hardware it support in a
  67 distribution neutral way.  I wrote
  68 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">a
  69 recipe on how to add such meta-information</a> in a blog post last
  70 December.  If you have a hardware related package in Debian, please
  71 announce the relevant hardware IDs using AppStream.</p>
  72
  73 <p>In Debian, almost all packages that can talk to a LEGO Mindestorms
  74 RCX or NXT unit, announce this support using AppStream.  The effect is
  75 that when you insert such LEGO robot controller into your Debian
  76 machine, Isenkram will propose to install the packages needed to get
  77 it working.  The intention is that this should allow the local user to
  78 start programming his robot controller right away without having to
  79 guess what packages to use or which permissions to fix.</p>
  80
  81 <p>But when I sat down with my son the other day to program our NXT
  82 unit using his Debian Stretch computer, I discovered something
  83 annoying.  The local console user (ie my son) did not get access to
  84 the USB device for programming the unit.  This used to work, but no
  85 longer in Jessie and Stretch.  After some investigation and asking
  86 around on #debian-devel, I discovered that this was because udev had
  87 changed the mechanism used to grant access to local devices.  The
  88 ConsoleKit mechanism from <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>
  89 no longer applied, because LDAP users no longer was added to the
  90 plugdev group during login.  Michael Biebl told me that this method
  91 was obsolete and the new method used ACLs instead.  This was good
  92 news, as the plugdev mechanism is a mess when using a remote user
  93 directory like LDAP.  Using ACLs would make sure a user lost device
  94 access when she logged out, even if the user left behind a background
  95 process which would retain the plugdev membership with the ConsoleKit
  96 setup.  Armed with this knowledge I moved on to fix the access problem
  97 for the LEGO Mindstorms related packages.</p>
  98
  99 <p>The new system uses a udev tag, 'uaccess'.  It can either be
 100 applied directly for a device, or is applied in
 101 /lib/udev/rules.d/70-uaccess.rules for classes of devices.  As the
 102 LEGO Mindstorms udev rules did not have a class, I decided to add the
 103 tag directly in the udev rules files included in the packages.  Here
 104 is one example.  For the nqc C compiler for the RCX, the
 105 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/60-nqc.rules</tt> file now look like this:
 106
 107 <p><pre>
 108 SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", ATTR{idVendor}=="0694", ATTR{idProduct}=="0001", \
 109     SYMLINK+="rcx-%k", TAG+="uaccess"
 110 </pre></p>
 111
 112 <p>I suspect all packages using plugdev in their /lib/udev/rules.d/
 113 files should be changed to use this tag (either directly or indirectly
 114 via <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>).  Perhaps a lintian check should be
 115 created to detect this?</p>
 116
 117 <p>I've been unable to find good documentation on the uaccess feature.
 118 It is unclear to me if the uaccess tag is an internal implementation
 119 detail like the udev-acl tag used by
 120 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>.  If it is, I guess the
 121 indirect method is the preferred way.  Michael
 122 <a href="https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4288">asked for more
 123 documentation from the systemd project</a> and I hope it will make
 124 this clearer.  For now I use the generic classes when they exist and
 125 is already handled by <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>, and add the tag
 126 directly if no such class exist.</p>
 127
 128 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
 129 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
 130 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
 131
 132 <p>To help out making life for LEGO constructors in Debian easier,
 133 please join us on our IRC channel
 134 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> and join
 135 the <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-lego/">Debian
 136 LEGO team</a> in the Alioth project we created yesterday.  A mailing
 137 list is not yet created, but we are working on it. :)</p>
 138
 139 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 140 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 141 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 142
 143       </div>
 144       <div class="tags">
 145
 146
 147         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
 148
 149
 150       </div>
 151     </div>
 152     <div class="padding"></div>
 153
 154     <div class="entry">
 155       <div class="title">
 156         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_draft_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_now_public.html">First draft Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook now public</a>
 157       </div>
 158       <div class="date">
 159         30th August 2016
 160       </div>
 161       <div class="body">
 162         <p>In April we
 163 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">started
 164 to work</a> on a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the "open access" book on
 165 how to set up and administrate a Debian system.  Today I am happy to
 166 report that the first draft is now publicly available.  You can find
 167 it on <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/">get the Debian
 168 Administrator's Handbook page</a> (under Other languages).  The first
 169 eight chapters have a first draft translation, and we are working on
 170 proofreading the content.  If you want to help out, please start
 171 contributing using
 172 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
 173 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
 174 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
 175 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
 176 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
 177 contributors</a>.  A good way to contribute is to proofread the text
 178 and update weblate if you find errors.</p>
 179
 180 <p>Our goal is still to make the Norwegian book available on paper as well as
 181 electronic form.</p>
 182
 183       </div>
 184       <div class="tags">
 185
 186
 187         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 188
 189
 190       </div>
 191     </div>
 192     <div class="padding"></div>
 193
 194     <div class="entry">
 195       <div class="title">
 196         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">Coz can help you find bottlenecks in multi-threaded software - nice free software</a>
 197       </div>
 198       <div class="date">
 199         11th August 2016
 200       </div>
 201       <div class="body">
 202         <p>This summer, I read a great article
 203 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">coz:
 204 This Is the Profiler You're Looking For</a>" in USENIX ;login: about
 205 how to profile multi-threaded programs.  It presented a system for
 206 profiling software by running experiences in the running program,
 207 testing how run time performance is affected by "speeding up" parts of
 208 the code to various degrees compared to a normal run.  It does this by
 209 slowing down parallel threads while the "faster up" code is running
 210 and measure how this affect processing time.  The processing time is
 211 measured using probes inserted into the code, either using progress
 212 counters (COZ_PROGRESS) or as latency meters (COZ_BEGIN/COZ_END).  It
 213 can also measure unmodified code by measuring complete the program
 214 runtime and running the program several times instead.</p>
 215
 216 <p>The project and presentation was so inspiring that I would like to
 217 get the system into Debian.  I
 218 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=830708">created
 219 a WNPP request for it</a> and contacted upstream to try to make the
 220 system ready for Debian by sending patches.  The build process need to
 221 be changed a bit to avoid running 'git clone' to get dependencies, and
 222 to include the JavaScript web page used to visualize the collected
 223 profiling information included in the source package.
 224 But I expect that should work out fairly soon.</p>
 225
 226 <p>The way the system work is fairly simple.  To run an coz experiment
 227 on a binary with debug symbols available, start the program like this:
 228
 229 <p><blockquote><pre>
 230 coz run --- program-to-run
 231 </pre></blockquote></p>
 232
 233 <p>This will create a text file profile.coz with the instrumentation
 234 information.  To show what part of the code affect the performance
 235 most, use a web browser and either point it to
 236 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/</a>
 237 or use the copy from git (in the gh-pages branch).  Check out this web
 238 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
 239 profiling more useful you include &lt;coz.h&gt; and insert the
 240 COZ_PROGRESS or COZ_BEGIN and COZ_END at appropriate places in the
 241 code, rebuild and run the profiler.  This allow coz to do more
 242 targeted experiments.</p>
 243
 244 <p>A video published by ACM
 245 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE0V-p1odPg">presenting the
 246 Coz profiler</a> is available from Youtube.  There is also a paper
 247 from the 25th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles available
 248 titled
 249 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/curtsinger">Coz:
 250 finding code that counts with causal profiling</a>.</p>
 251
 252 <p><a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz">The source code</a>
 253 for Coz is available from github.  It will only build with clang
 254 because it uses a
 255 <a href="https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55606">C++
 256 feature missing in GCC</a>, but I've submitted
 257 <a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz/pull/67">a patch to solve
 258 it</a> and hope it will be included in the upstream source soon.</p>
 259
 260 <p>Please get in touch if you, like me, would like to see this piece
 261 of software in Debian.  I would very much like some help with the
 262 packaging effort, as I lack the in depth knowledge on how to package
 263 C++ libraries.</p>
 264
 265       </div>
 266       <div class="tags">
 267
 268
 269         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
 270
 271
 272       </div>
 273     </div>
 274     <div class="padding"></div>
 275
 276     <div class="entry">
 277       <div class="title">
 278         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlocking_HTC_Desire_HD_on_Linux_using_unruu_and_fastboot.html">Unlocking HTC Desire HD on Linux using unruu and fastboot</a>
 279       </div>
 280       <div class="date">
 281          7th July 2016
 282       </div>
 283       <div class="body">
 284         <p>Yesterday, I tried to unlock a HTC Desire HD phone, and it proved
 285 to be a slight challenge.  Here is the recipe if I ever need to do it
 286 again.  It all started by me wanting to try the recipe to set up
 287 <a href="https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy">an
 288 hardened Android installation</a> from the Tor project blog on a
 289 device I had access to.  It is a old mobile phone with a broken
 290 microphone The initial idea had been to just
 291 <a href="http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_ace">install
 292 CyanogenMod on it</a>, but did not quite find time to start on it
 293 until a few days ago.</p>
 294
 295 <p>The unlock process is supposed to be simple: (1) Boot into the boot
 296 loader (press volume down and power at the same time), (2) select
 297 'fastboot' before (3) connecting the device via USB to a Linux
 298 machine, (4) request the device identifier token by running 'fastboot
 299 oem get_identifier_token', (5) request the device unlocking key using
 300 the <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader/">HTC developer web
 301 site</a> and unlock the phone using the key file emailed to you.</p>
 302
 303 <p>Unfortunately, this only work fi you have hboot version 2.00.0029
 304 or newer, and the device I was working on had 2.00.0027.  This
 305 apparently can be easily fixed by downloading a Windows program and
 306 running it on your Windows machine, if you accept the terms Microsoft
 307 require you to accept to use Windows - which I do not.  So I had to
 308 come up with a different approach.  I got a lot of help from AndyCap
 309 on #nuug, and would not have been able to get this working without
 310 him.</p>
 311
 312 <p>First I needed to extract the hboot firmware from
 313 <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/ruu/PD9810000_Ace_Sense30_S_hboot_2.00.0029.exe">the
 314 windows binary for HTC Desire HD</a> downloaded as 'the RUU' from HTC.
 315 For this there is is <a href="https://github.com/kmdm/unruu/">a github
 316 project named unruu</a> using libunshield.  The unshield tool did not
 317 recognise the file format, but unruu worked and extracted rom.zip,
 318 containing the new hboot firmware and a text file describing which
 319 devices it would work for.</p>
 320
 321 <p>Next, I needed to get the new firmware into the device.  For this I
 322 followed some instructions
 323 <a href="http://www.htc1guru.com/2013/09/new-ruu-zips-posted/">available
 324 from HTC1Guru.com</a>, and ran these commands as root on a Linux
 325 machine with Debian testing:</p>
 326
 327 <p><pre>
 328 adb reboot-bootloader
 329 fastboot oem rebootRUU
 330 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
 331 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
 332 fastboot reboot
 333 </pre></p>
 334
 335 <p>The flash command apparently need to be done twice to take effect,
 336 as the first is just preparations and the second one do the flashing.
 337 The adb command is just to get to the boot loader menu, so turning the
 338 device on while holding volume down and the power button should work
 339 too.</p>
 340
 341 <p>With the new hboot version in place I could start following the
 342 instructions on the HTC developer web site.  I got the device token
 343 like this:</p>
 344
 345 <p><pre>
 346 fastboot oem get_identifier_token 2>&1 | sed 's/(bootloader) //'
 347 </pre>
 348
 349 <p>And once I got the unlock code via email, I could use it like
 350 this:</p>
 351
 352 <p><pre>
 353 fastboot flash unlocktoken Unlock_code.bin
 354 </pre></p>
 355
 356 <p>And with that final step in place, the phone was unlocked and I
 357 could start stuffing the software of my own choosing into the device.
 358 So far I only inserted a replacement recovery image to wipe the phone
 359 before I start.  We will see what happen next.  Perhaps I should
 360 install <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> on it. :)</p>
 361
 362       </div>
 363       <div class="tags">
 364
 365
 366         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
 367
 368
 369       </div>
 370     </div>
 371     <div class="padding"></div>
 372
 373     <div class="entry">
 374       <div class="title">
 375         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html">How to use the Signal app if you only have a land line (ie no mobile phone)</a>
 376       </div>
 377       <div class="date">
 378          3rd July 2016
 379       </div>
 380       <div class="body">
 381         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to test
 382 <a href="https://whispersystems.org/">the Signal app</a>, as it is
 383 said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my
 384 friends and family are already using it.  As I by choice do not own a
 385 mobile phone, this proved to be harder than expected.  And I wanted to
 386 have the source of the client and know that it was the code used on my
 387 machine.  But yesterday I managed to get it working.  I used the
 388 Github source, compared it to the source in
 389 <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/signal-private-messenger/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk?hl=en-US">the
 390 Signal Chrome app</a> available from the Chrome web store, applied
 391 patches to use the production Signal servers, started the app and
 392 asked for the hidden "register without a smart phone" form.  Here is
 393 the recipe how I did it.</p>
 394
 395 <p>First, I fetched the Signal desktop source from Github, using
 396
 397 <pre>
 398 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
 399 </pre>
 400
 401 <p>Next, I patched the source to use the production servers, to be
 402 able to talk to other Signal users:</p>
 403
 404 <pre>
 405 cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p0
 406 diff -ur ./js/background.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js
 407 --- ./js/background.js  2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
 408 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js    2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
 409 @@ -47,8 +47,8 @@
 410          });
 411      });
 412
 413 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
 414 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
 415 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org:4433';
 416 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
 417      var messageReceiver;
 418      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
 419          if (messageReceiver) {
 420 diff -ur ./js/expire.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js
 421 --- ./js/expire.js      2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
 422 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
 423 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 424  ;(function() {
 425      'use strict';
 426 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
 427 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 1474492690000;
 428
 429      window.extension = window.extension || {};
 430
 431 EOF
 432 </pre>
 433
 434 <p>The first part is changing the servers, and the second is updating
 435 an expiration timestamp.  This timestamp need to be updated regularly.
 436 It is set 90 days in the future by the build process (Gruntfile.js).
 437 The value is seconds since 1970 times 1000, as far as I can tell.</p>
 438
 439 <p>Based on a tip and good help from the #nuug IRC channel, I wrote a
 440 script to launch Signal in Chromium.</p>
 441
 442 <pre>
 443 #!/bin/sh
 444 cd $(dirname $0)
 445 mkdir -p userdata
 446 exec chromium \
 447   --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
 448   --user-data-dir=`pwd`/userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
 449 </pre>
 450
 451 <p> The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor
 452 SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today
 453 Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines
 454 will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal
 455 connections if they use source IP address.</p>
 456
 457 <p>When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under
 458 "Standalone Registration" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git
 459 repository.  I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the
 460 Chromium debugging tool, visited the 'Console' tab and wrote
 461 'extension.install("standalone")' on the console prompt to get the
 462 registration form.  Then I entered by land line phone number and
 463 pressed 'Call'.  5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice
 464 repeated the verification code three times.  After entering the number
 465 into the verification code field in the form, I could start using
 466 Signal from my laptop.
 467
 468 <p>As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to
 469 whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server,
 470 but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server
 471 setup.  It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the
 472 content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data
 473 exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know.
 474 So better than many options, but not great.  And sadly the usage is
 475 connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server
 476 to associate it to my home and person.  I would prefer it if only
 477 those I knew could tell who I was on Signal.  There are options
 478 avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not
 479 using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.</p>
 480
 481       </div>
 482       <div class="tags">
 483
 484
 485         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 486
 487
 488       </div>
 489     </div>
 490     <div class="padding"></div>
 491
 492     <div class="entry">
 493       <div class="title">
 494         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?</a>
 495       </div>
 496       <div class="date">
 497          6th June 2016
 498       </div>
 499       <div class="body">
 500         <p>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
 501 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">which
 502 multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
 503 MIME types</a>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
 504 the various players claimed support for.  The range was from 55 to 130
 505 MIME types.  I suspect most media formats are supported by all
 506 players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
 507 their desktop files.  There are probably also some bogus MIME types
 508 listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.</p>
 509
 510 <p>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
 511 the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
 512 and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
 513 favorite media player VLC.  The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
 514 yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
 515 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">Multimedia
 516 player MIME type support status</a> Debian wiki page.</p>
 517
 518 <p>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?  It is VLC, followed by
 519 totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
 520 kmplayer.  I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
 521 several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
 522 toten and parole.</p>
 523
 524 <p>A sad observation is that only 14 MIME types are listed as
 525 supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
 526 desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
 527 audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
 528 video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
 529 video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo.  Personally I find
 530 it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
 531 players in Debian.  As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
 532 formats.</p>
 533
 534       </div>
 535       <div class="tags">
 536
 537
 538         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
 539
 540
 541       </div>
 542     </div>
 543     <div class="padding"></div>
 544
 545     <div class="entry">
 546       <div class="title">
 547         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html">A program should be able to open its own files on Linux</a>
 548       </div>
 549       <div class="date">
 550          5th June 2016
 551       </div>
 552       <div class="body">
 553         <p>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
 554 decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
 555 talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine.  I
 556 wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
 557 the day before I would give the talk.  The next day I took a plane to
 558 the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
 559 started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
 560 that kpresenter refused to load its own data file.  I cursed a bit and
 561 started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
 562 present when I arrived.  I tested that the saved files could be
 563 loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued.  I continued to polish the
 564 slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
 565 be loaded into kpresenter.  In the end I had to rewrite the slides
 566 three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
 567 shorter.  After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem &ndash;
 568 kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
 569 Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
 570 program to make slides.  The point I'm trying to make is that we
 571 expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
 572 embarrassing to its developers if it can't.</p>
 573
 574 <p>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
 575 files from the desktop file browser?  It is not a uncommon problem.  A
 576 while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
 577 gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
 578 browser would refuse to open.  No video player claimed to understand
 579 such file.  I tracked down the cause being <tt>file --mime-type</tt>
 580 returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
 581 installed listed as a MIME type they would understand.  I asked for
 582 <a href="http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=382">file to change its
 583 behavour</a> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead.  I also asked
 584 several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
 585 the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files.  After a
 586 while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
 587 output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.</p>
 588
 589 <p>But history repeats itself.  A few days ago I tested the music
 590 system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
 591 browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
 592 (*.rg).  I've reported <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/825993">the
 593 rosegarden problem to BTS</a> and a fix is commited to git and will be
 594 included in the next upload.  To increase the chance of me remembering
 595 how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
 596 from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.</p>
 597
 598 <p>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
 599 There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file.  The output from
 600 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> mentioned above, and the content of the
 601 shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/).  The file MIME
 602 type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
 603 information is collected from
 604 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/">the
 605 desktop files</a> available in /usr/share/applications/.  If there is
 606 one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
 607 activated when asking to open a given file.  If there are more, one
 608 can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
 609 selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar.  In general
 610 this work well.  But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
 611 type (preferably
 612 <a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">a
 613 MIME type registered with IANA</a>), file and/or the shared MIME
 614 registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
 615 type in its list of supported MIME types.</p>
 616
 617 <p>The <tt>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml</tt> entry for
 618 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec">the
 619 Shared MIME database</a> look like this:</p>
 620
 621 <p><blockquote><pre>
 622 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
 623 &lt;mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"&gt;
 624   &lt;mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden"&gt;
 625     &lt;sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/&gt;
 626     &lt;comment&gt;Rosegarden project file&lt;/comment&gt;
 627     &lt;glob pattern="*.rg"/&gt;
 628   &lt;/mime-type&gt;
 629 &lt;/mime-info&gt;
 630 </pre></blockquote></p>
 631
 632 <p>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
 633 (it is a gzipped XML file).  Note, it is much better to use an
 634 official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
 635 unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.</p>
 636
 637 <p>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
 638 audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
 639 file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:</p>
 640
 641 <p><blockquote><pre>
 642 % grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
 643 MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
 644 X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
 645 %
 646 </pre></blockquote></p>
 647
 648 <p>The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the
 649 MimeType= line.</p>
 650
 651 <p>If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when
 652 selected from the file browser, please check out the output from
 653 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> for the file, ensure the file ending and
 654 MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check
 655 that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming
 656 support for this MIME type.  If not, please report a bug to have it
 657 fixed. :)</p>
 658
 659       </div>
 660       <div class="tags">
 661
 662
 663         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 664
 665
 666       </div>
 667     </div>
 668     <div class="padding"></div>
 669
 670     <div class="entry">
 671       <div class="title">
 672         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_with_PackageKit_support___new_version_0_23_available_in_Debian_unstable.html">Isenkram with PackageKit support - new version 0.23 available in Debian unstable</a>
 673       </div>
 674       <div class="date">
 675         25th May 2016
 676       </div>
 677       <div class="body">
 678         <p><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">The isenkram
 679 system</a> is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware
 680 related packages.  The idea is to have a database of mappings between
 681 hardware and packages, and pop up a dialog suggesting for the user to
 682 install the packages to use a given hardware dongle.  Some use cases
 683 are when you insert a Yubikey, it proposes to install the software
 684 needed to control it; when you insert a braille reader list it
 685 proposes to install the packages needed to send text to the reader;
 686 and when you insert a ColorHug screen calibrator it suggests to
 687 install the driver for it.  The system work well, and even have a few
 688 command line tools to install firmware packages and packages for the
 689 hardware already in the machine (as opposed to hotpluggable hardware).</p>
 690
 691 <p>The system was initially written using aptdaemon, because I found
 692 good documentation and example code on how to use it.  But aptdaemon
 693 is going away and is generally being replaced by
 694 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/">PackageKit</a>,
 695 so Isenkram needed a rewrite.  And today, thanks to the great patch
 696 from my college Sunil Mohan Adapa in the FreedomBox project, the
 697 rewrite finally took place.  I've just uploaded a new version of
 698 Isenkram into Debian Unstable with the patch included, and the default
 699 for the background daemon is now to use PackageKit.  To check it out,
 700 install the <tt>isenkram</tt> package and insert some hardware dongle
 701 and see if it is recognised.</p>
 702
 703 <p>If you want to know what kind of packages isenkram would propose for
 704 the machine it is running on, you can check out the isenkram-lookup
 705 program.  This is what it look like on a Thinkpad X230:</p>
 706
 707 <p><blockquote><pre>
 708 % isenkram-lookup
 709 bluez
 710 cheese
 711 fprintd
 712 fprintd-demo
 713 gkrellm-thinkbat
 714 hdapsd
 715 libpam-fprintd
 716 pidgin-blinklight
 717 thinkfan
 718 tleds
 719 tp-smapi-dkms
 720 tp-smapi-source
 721 tpb
 722 %p
 723 </pre></blockquote></p>
 724
 725 <p>The hardware mappings come from several places.  The preferred way
 726 is for packages to announce their hardware support using
 727 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
 728 cross distribution appstream system</a>.
 729 See
 730 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">previous
 731 blog posts about isenkram</a> to learn how to do that.</p>
 732
 733       </div>
 734       <div class="tags">
 735
 736
 737         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
 738
 739
 740       </div>
 741     </div>
 742     <div class="padding"></div>
 743
 744     <div class="entry">
 745       <div class="title">
 746         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Discharge_rate_estimate_in_new_battery_statistics_collector_for_Debian.html">Discharge rate estimate in new battery statistics collector for Debian</a>
 747       </div>
 748       <div class="date">
 749         23rd May 2016
 750       </div>
 751       <div class="body">
 752         <p>Yesterday I updated the
 753 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats
 754 package in Debian</a> with a few patches sent to me by skilled and
 755 enterprising users.  There were some nice user and visible changes.
 756 First of all, both desktop menu entries now work.  A design flaw in
 757 one of the script made the history graph fail to show up (its PNG was
 758 dumped in ~/.xsession-errors) if no controlling TTY was available.
 759 The script worked when called from the command line, but not when
 760 called from the desktop menu.  I changed this to look for a DISPLAY
 761 variable or a TTY before deciding where to draw the graph, and now the
 762 graph window pop up as expected.</p>
 763
 764 <p>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
 765 graphs (the one showing the last few hours).  New is also the user of
 766 colours showing charging in blue and discharge in red.  The percentages
 767 of this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
 768 capacity.</p>
 769
 770 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-rate.png"/></p>
 771
 772 <p>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
 773 statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to
 774 visualise how the battery life time get shorter over time.  The red
 775 line in this graph is what the previous graph considers 100 percent:
 776
 777 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-history.png"/></p>
 778
 779 <p>In this graph you can see that I only charge the battery to 80
 780 percent of last full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is
 781 shrinking. :(</p>
 782
 783 <p>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle
 784 more hardware models.  On some hardware, Linux power supply
 785 information is stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the
 786 collector previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/.  Now
 787 both are checked to figure if there is power connected to the
 788 machine.</p>
 789
 790 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
 791 check out the
 792 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
 793 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
 794 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from <a
 795 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
 796 Patches are very welcome.</p>
 797
 798 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 799 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 800 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 801
 802       </div>
 803       <div class="tags">
 804
 805
 806         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 807
 808
 809       </div>
 810     </div>
 811     <div class="padding"></div>
 812
 813     <div class="entry">
 814       <div class="title">
 815         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html">Debian now with ZFS on Linux included</a>
 816       </div>
 817       <div class="date">
 818         12th May 2016
 819       </div>
 820       <div class="body">
 821         <p>Today, after many years of hard work from many people,
 822 <a href="http://zfsonlinux.org/">ZFS for Linux</a> finally entered
 823 Debian.  The package status can be seen on
 824 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zfs-linux">the package tracker
 825 for zfs-linux</a>.  and
 826 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
 827 team status page</a>. If you want to help out, please join us.
 828 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">The
 829 source code</a> is available via git on Alioth.  It would also be
 830 great if you could help out with
 831 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dkms">the dkms package</a>, as
 832 it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.</p>
 833
 834       </div>
 835       <div class="tags">
 836
 837
 838         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 839
 840
 841       </div>
 842     </div>
 843     <div class="padding"></div>
 844
 845     <div class="entry">
 846       <div class="title">
 847         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">What is the best multimedia player in Debian?</a>
 848       </div>
 849       <div class="date">
 850          8th May 2016
 851       </div>
 852       <div class="body">
 853         <p><strong>Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in
 854 Debian claim support for most file formats.</strong></p>
 855
 856 <p>A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser
 857 plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian
 858 Edu.  I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types
 859 for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser
 860 plugin supported most file formats / media types.
 861 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">The
 862 result</a> can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have
 863 not been updated for a while.  But browser plugins are less relevant
 864 these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone
 865 players.</p>
 866
 867 <p>A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable
 868 player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National
 869 Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why.  The cause is a
 870 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/822245">missing MIME type in the VLC
 871 desktop file</a>.  In the process I wrote a script to compare the set
 872 of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin,
 873 only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the
 874 two for VLC.  This discovery made me dig up the script I used to
 875 compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files
 876 instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian
 877 support most file formats.</p>
 878
 879 <p>The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as
 880 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">a
 881 table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included
 882 in the table</a>, with the package supporting most MIME types being
 883 listed first in the table.</p>
 884
 885 </p>The best multimedia player in Debian?  It is totem, followed by
 886 parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and
 887 kmplayer.  Time for the other players to update their announced MIME
 888 support?</p>
 889
 890       </div>
 891       <div class="tags">
 892
 893
 894         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
 895
 896
 897       </div>
 898     </div>
 899     <div class="padding"></div>
 900
 901     <div class="entry">
 902       <div class="title">
 903         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html">The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled</a>
 904       </div>
 905       <div class="date">
 906          4th May 2016
 907       </div>
 908       <div class="body">
 909         A friend of mine made me aware of
 910 <a href="https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/">The Pyra</a>, a
 911 handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled.  I
 912 would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)</p>
 913
 914 <p>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
 915 plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5"
 916 LCD touch screen.  The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
 917 day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
 918 confirming this.  The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
 919 last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before
 920 production started.</p>
 921
 922 <p>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
 923 Debian.  Please let me know if you know of any others.  Is it the
 924 first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?</p>
 925
 926       </div>
 927       <div class="tags">
 928
 929
 930         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 931
 932
 933       </div>
 934     </div>
 935     <div class="padding"></div>
 936
 937     <div class="entry">
 938       <div class="title">
 939         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Lets make a Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
 940       </div>
 941       <div class="date">
 942         10th April 2016
 943       </div>
 944       <div class="body">
 945         <p>During this weekends
 946 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml">bug
 947 squashing party and developer gathering</a>, we decided to do our part
 948 to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
 949 Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
 950 <a href="http://debian-handbook.info/">Debian Administrator's Handbook
 951 project</a> to get started.  If you want to help out, please start
 952 contributing using
 953 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
 954 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
 955 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
 956 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
 957 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
 958 contributors</a>.</p>
 959
 960 <p>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
 961 Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
 962 Bokmål too.  In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
 963 Mobi versions available.  And there are incomplete translations
 964 available for many more languages.</p>
 965
 966       </div>
 967       <div class="tags">
 968
 969
 970         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 971
 972
 973       </div>
 974     </div>
 975     <div class="padding"></div>
 976
 977     <div class="entry">
 978       <div class="title">
 979         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_in_two_hundred_Debian_users_using_ZFS_on_Linux_.html">One in two hundred Debian users using ZFS on Linux?</a>
 980       </div>
 981       <div class="date">
 982          7th April 2016
 983       </div>
 984       <div class="body">
 985         <p>Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
 986 packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found.  I use
 987 ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
 988 But I might be wrong.</p>
 989
 990 <p>According to
 991 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=spl-linux">the popcon
 992 results for spl-linux</a>, there are 1019 Debian installations, or
 993 0.53% of the population, with the package installed.  As far as I know
 994 the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
 995 on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
 996 installation on Linux in Debian.  In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
 997 the ZFS feature is already available, and there
 998 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=zfsutils">the popcon
 999 results for zfsutils</a> show 1625 Debian installations or 0.84% of
1000 the population.  So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.</p>
1001
1002 <p>But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
1003 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00006.html">announced
1004 in April 2015</a> that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
1005 cleared, the package is still not in Debian.  The package is again in
1006 the NEW queue.  Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
1007 debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
1008 to give up.  The current status can be seen on
1009 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
1010 team status page</a>, and
1011 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">the
1012 source code</a> is available on Alioth.</p>
1013
1014 <p>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
1015 my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
1016 packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
1017 accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
1018 to help out the team.  This was the background for my blog post about
1019 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">creating,
1020 updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>, and I
1021 used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
1022 copyright file.  It is not very easy to check every one of the around
1023 2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
1024 right.  If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
1025 find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.</p>
1026
1027       </div>
1028       <div class="tags">
1029
1030
1031         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1032
1033
1034       </div>
1035     </div>
1036     <div class="padding"></div>
1037
1038     <div class="entry">
1039       <div class="title">
1040         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Full_battery_stats_collector_is_now_available_in_Debian.html">Full battery stats collector is now available in Debian</a>
1041       </div>
1042       <div class="date">
1043         23rd March 2016
1044       </div>
1045       <div class="body">
1046         <p>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
1047 extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
1048 later processing and graphing.  The original collector store the
1049 battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
1050 collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
1051 full level, last full level and current battery level.  This make it
1052 possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
1053 the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.</p>
1054
1055 <p>The new tools are available in <tt>/usr/share/battery-stats/</tt>
1056 in the version 0.5.1 package in unstable.  Get the new battery level graph
1057 and lifetime prediction by running:
1058
1059 <p><pre>
1060 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
1061 </pre></p>
1062
1063 <p>Or select the 'Battery Level Graph' from your application menu.</p>
1064
1065 <p>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
1066 entry yet):</p>
1067
1068 <p><pre>
1069 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
1070 </pre></p>
1071
1072 <p>I'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
1073 when there are few data points.  The graphs look a bit better with a
1074 few years of data.</p>
1075
1076 <p>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
1077 collector broke in Debian.  The scripts in
1078 <tt>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/</tt> were no longer executed.  I
1079 suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
1080 know.  The issue is reported as
1081 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/818649">bug #818649</a> against
1082 pm-utils.  I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call
1083 the collector script every time the power connector is connected and
1084 disconnected.  With this fix in place it was finally time to make a
1085 new release of the package, and get it into Debian.</p>
1086
1087 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
1088 check out the
1089 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
1090 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
1091 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
1092 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
1093 As always, patches are very welcome.</p>
1094
1095       </div>
1096       <div class="tags">
1097
1098
1099         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1100
1101
1102       </div>
1103     </div>
1104     <div class="padding"></div>
1105
1106     <div class="entry">
1107       <div class="title">
1108         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_battery_measurements_a_little_easier_in_Debian.html">Making battery measurements a little easier in Debian</a>
1109       </div>
1110       <div class="date">
1111         15th March 2016
1112       </div>
1113       <div class="body">
1114         <p>Back in September, I blogged about
1115 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">the
1116 system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery</a>, and
1117 how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced).  I
1118 created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
1119 but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
1120 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">a battery-stats
1121 package in Debian</a> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
1122 a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
1123 fixed instead.  I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
1124 hoped someone would step in and fix it.  But no-one did.</p>
1125
1126 <p>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
1127 hands.  The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
1128 battery stats (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">available from github</a>) and part of the team maintaining
1129 battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
1130 able to collect battery status using the <tt>/sys/class/power_supply/</tt>
1131 information provided by the Linux kernel.  If you install the
1132 battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
1133 graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
1134 status of the battery.  The source package build and work just fine in
1135 Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
1136 tested).  The default graph you get for that system look like this:</p>
1137
1138 <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>
1139
1140 <p>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
1141 battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
1142 about the battery.  The scripts are merged into the upstream
1143 battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
1144 yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way.  Will have to test a
1145 bit more before I make a new release.</p>
1146
1147 <p>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
1148 suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
1149 impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
1150 and graphing.</p>
1151
1152 <p>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
1153 battery, check out the battery-stats package in
1154 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">Debian</a> and
1155 on
1156 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
1157 I would love some help to improve the system further.</p>
1158
1159       </div>
1160       <div class="tags">
1161
1162
1163         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1164
1165
1166       </div>
1167     </div>
1168     <div class="padding"></div>
1169
1170     <div class="entry">
1171       <div class="title">
1172         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">Creating, updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>
1173       </div>
1174       <div class="date">
1175         19th February 2016
1176       </div>
1177       <div class="body">
1178         <p>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
1179 details.  And one of the details is the content of the
1180 debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
1181 the code in the package in question, preferably in
1182 <a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/">machine
1183 readable DEP5 format</a>.</p>
1184
1185 <p>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
1186 and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
1187 package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters.  So getting it right
1188 the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
1189 both you and the ftpmasters some work..  Today, while trying to figure
1190 out what was wrong with
1191 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=686447">the
1192 zfsonlinux copyright file</a>, I decided to spend some time on
1193 figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
1194 semi-automatically.</p>
1195
1196 <p>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
1197 file based on the code in the source package,
1198 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake">debmake</a></tt>
1199 and <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme">cme</a></tt>.  I'm
1200 not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
1201 create a sensible draft file.  As far as I can tell, none of them can
1202 be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
1203 polished a bit before the file is OK to upload.  I found the debmake
1204 option in
1205 <a href="http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/2014/07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-5.html">a
1206 blog posts from 2014</a>.
1207
1208 <p>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
1209
1210 <p><pre>
1211 debmake -cc > debian/copyright
1212 </pre></p>
1213
1214 <p>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
1215 this might not be the best option.</p>
1216
1217 <p>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
1218 this approach in
1219 <a href="https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/">a
1220 blog post from 2015</a>.  To generate using cme, use the 'update
1221 dpkg-copyright' option:
1222
1223 <p><pre>
1224 cme update dpkg-copyright
1225 </pre></p>
1226
1227 <p>This will create or update debian/copyright.  The cme tool seem to
1228 handle UTF-8 names better than debmake.</p>
1229
1230 <p>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
1231 check if the file is correct.  For this I found two good options,
1232 <tt>debmake -k</tt> and <tt>license-reconcile</tt>.  The former seem
1233 to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
1234 ineffective blocks in the copyright file.  The latter reports missing
1235 copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
1236 names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-1.0).  I suspect it is good to use both and
1237 fix all issues reported by them before uploading.  But I do not know
1238 if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
1239 copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.</p>
1240
1241 <p>The devscripts tool <tt>licensecheck</tt> deserve mentioning.  It
1242 will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
1243 It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
1244 can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.</p>
1245
1246 <p>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
1247 debian/copyright file.  Please let me know, or blog about it on
1248 planet.debian.org.</p>
1249
1250 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1251 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1252 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1253
1254 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-20</strong>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
1255 on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
1256
1257 <p><pre>
1258 licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
1259   /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5 > debian/copyright.auto
1260 </pre></p>
1261
1262 <p>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
1263 version control system to make it easier to discover license and
1264 copyright changes in the upstream source.  I will try to do the same
1265 with my packages in the future.</p>
1266
1267 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-21</strong>: The cme author recommended
1268 against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
1269 command line.</p>
1270
1271       </div>
1272       <div class="tags">
1273
1274
1275         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1276
1277
1278       </div>
1279     </div>
1280     <div class="padding"></div>
1281
1282     <div class="entry">
1283       <div class="title">
1284         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_in_Debian_to_locate_packages_with_firmware_and_mime_type_support.html">Using appstream in Debian to locate packages with firmware and mime type support</a>
1285       </div>
1286       <div class="date">
1287          4th February 2016
1288       </div>
1289       <div class="body">
1290         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">appstream system</a>
1291 is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
1292 convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
1293 firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it.  This can
1294 be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
1295 about. :)</p>
1296
1297 <p>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
1298 file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
1299 picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
1300 unstable.  In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
1301 by the kernel during kernel module loading.  To find the package
1302 providing the example file, do like this:</p>
1303
1304 <blockquote><pre>
1305 % apt install appstream
1306 [...]
1307 % apt update
1308 [...]
1309 % appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin | \
1310   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
1311 firmware-qlogic
1312 %
1313 </pre></blockquote>
1314
1315 <p>See <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">the
1316 appstream wiki</a> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
1317 a way appstream can use.</p>
1318
1319 <p>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
1320 given MIME type.  This is very useful when you get a file you do not
1321 know how to handle.  First find the mime type using <tt>file
1322 --mime-type</tt>, and next look up the package providing support for
1323 it.  Lets say you got an SVG file.  Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
1324 and you can find all packages handling this type like this:</p>
1325
1326 <blockquote><pre>
1327 % apt install appstream
1328 [...]
1329 % apt update
1330 [...]
1331 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
1332   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
1333 bkchem
1334 phototonic
1335 inkscape
1336 shutter
1337 tetzle
1338 geeqie
1339 xia
1340 pinta
1341 gthumb
1342 karbon
1343 comix
1344 mirage
1345 viewnior
1346 postr
1347 ristretto
1348 kolourpaint4
1349 eog
1350 eom
1351 gimagereader
1352 midori
1353 %
1354 </pre></blockquote>
1355
1356 <p>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
1357 packages providing appstream metadata.</p>
1358
1359       </div>
1360       <div class="tags">
1361
1362
1363         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1364
1365
1366       </div>
1367     </div>
1368     <div class="padding"></div>
1369
1370     <div class="entry">
1371       <div class="title">
1372         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html">Creepy, visualise geotagged social media information - nice free software</a>
1373       </div>
1374       <div class="date">
1375         24th January 2016
1376       </div>
1377       <div class="body">
1378         <p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
1379 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
1380 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
1381 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent).  And if their
1382 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
1383 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
1384 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
1385 during installation).  And when these programs send out information to
1386 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
1387 extra care is taken to not send the location.  The provided
1388 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
1389 good and bad, depend on your point of view).  What is certain, is that
1390 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
1391 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
1392 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
1393 entities.</p>
1394
1395 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
1396
1397 <p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
1398 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing.  It is
1399 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
1400 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
1401 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information.  But the
1402 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
1403 tool to do so is called
1404 <a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>.  I
1405 discovered it when I read
1406 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
1407 article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
1408 November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
1409 The python program was in Debian, but
1410 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
1411 Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained.  I
1412 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
1413 have time to fix it then.  This Christmas I decided to finally try to
1414 get Creepy operational in Debian.  Now a fixed version is available in
1415 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
1416 are now included
1417 <a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
1418
1419 <p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
1420 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
1421 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
1422 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
1423 these services.  Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
1424 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
1425 days it is impossible.  This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
1426 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
1427 information to them about your search interests.  This should be taken
1428 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
1429 about yourself with the services.</p>
1430
1431 <p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
1432 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
1433 of Norway.  One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
1434 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
1435 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
1436 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
1437 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
1438 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
1439 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
1440 things.  A similar technique have been
1441 <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
1442 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
1443 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
1444 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
1445 public.</p>
1446
1447 <p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
1448 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
1449 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
1450 python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
1451
1452 <p>(I have uploaded
1453 <a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
1454 screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
1455 Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
1456
1457       </div>
1458       <div class="tags">
1459
1460
1461         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
1462
1463
1464       </div>
1465     </div>
1466     <div class="padding"></div>
1467
1468     <div class="entry">
1469       <div class="title">
1470         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Always_download_Debian_packages_using_Tor___the_simple_recipe.html">Always download Debian packages using Tor - the simple recipe</a>
1471       </div>
1472       <div class="date">
1473         15th January 2016
1474       </div>
1475       <div class="body">
1476         <p>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
1477 <a href="https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/331/what-is-to-be-done/">observed
1478 that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
1479 believe a computer have a given security hole</a> if it download a
1480 security fix from a Debian mirror.  This is a good reason to always
1481 use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
1482 listening do not know which IP address to attack.  In August, Richard
1483 Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
1484 to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
1485 download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
1486 <a href="http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/08/24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/">proposed
1487 to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror</a>.  He
1488 was not the first to propose this, as the
1489 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor">apt-transport-tor</a></tt>
1490 package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
1491 to use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, but I was not
1492 aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.</p>
1493
1494 <p>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
1495 sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
1496 Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
1497 it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
1498 making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.</p>
1499
1500 <p>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
1501 installing <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> and replacing http and https
1502 urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
1503 of the official Debian mirror site.  I recommend installing
1504 <tt>etckeeper</tt> before you start to have a history of the changes
1505 done in /etc/.</p>
1506
1507 <blockquote><pre>
1508 apt install apt-transport-tor
1509 sed -i 's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%' /etc/apt/sources.list
1510 sed -i 's% http% tor+http%' /etc/apt/sources.list
1511 </pre></blockquote>
1512
1513 <p>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
1514 the sed commands for these too.  The sed command is assuming your are
1515 using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror.  Adjust the command (or just
1516 edit the file manually) to match your mirror.</p>
1517
1518 <p>This work in Debian Jessie and later.  Note that tools like
1519 <tt>apt-file</tt> only recently started using the apt transport
1520 system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs.  For
1521 <tt>apt-file</tt> you need the version currently in experimental,
1522 which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable.  So if you
1523 need a working <tt>apt-file</tt>, this is not for you.</p>
1524
1525 <p>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
1526 using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
1527 update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
1528 masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine.  Using Tor will
1529 become normal for the machine in question.</p>
1530
1531 <p>On <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox</a>, APT
1532 is set up by default to use <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> when Tor is
1533 enabled.  It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
1534 system.</p>
1535
1536       </div>
1537       <div class="tags">
1538
1539
1540         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
1541
1542
1543       </div>
1544     </div>
1545     <div class="padding"></div>
1546
1547     <div class="entry">
1548       <div class="title">
1549         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenALPR__find_car_license_plates_in_video_streams___nice_free_software.html">OpenALPR, find car license plates in video streams - nice free software</a>
1550       </div>
1551       <div class="date">
1552         23rd December 2015
1553       </div>
1554       <div class="body">
1555         <p>When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to
1556 call the car license plate numbers in those days.  I would write the
1557 numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
1558 to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
1559 exotic or special region codes and numbers.  It was a fun game to pass
1560 time, as we kids have plenty of it.</p>
1561
1562 <p>A few days I came across
1563 <a href="https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr">the OpenALPR
1564 project</a>, a free software project to automatically discover and
1565 report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
1566 "car numbers" in a machine readable format.  I've been looking for
1567 such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
1568 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition">automatic
1569 number plate recognition</a> tool only is available in the hands of
1570 the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
1571 even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance.  I
1572 discovered the developer
1573 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/747509">wanted to get the tool into
1574 Debian</a>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
1575 help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
1576 archive.</p>
1577
1578 <p>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
1579 it into Debian, where it currently
1580 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2.1-1.html">waits
1581 in the NEW queue</a> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.</p>
1582
1583 <p>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
1584 for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
1585 surveillance system?  Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
1586 and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
1587 when number plates on my watch list are discovered.  Another use case
1588 was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
1589 to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
1590 car.  When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
1591 capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
1592 open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway.  I
1593 guess for such use case it make sense.  I am sure there are other use
1594 cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.</p>
1595
1596 <p>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
1597 out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
1598 before running "debuild" to build the source.  Or wait a bit until the
1599 package show up in unstable.</p>
1600
1601       </div>
1602       <div class="tags">
1603
1604
1605         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
1606
1607
1608       </div>
1609     </div>
1610     <div class="padding"></div>
1611
1612     <div class="entry">
1613       <div class="title">
1614         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">Using appstream with isenkram to install hardware related packages in Debian</a>
1615       </div>
1616       <div class="date">
1617         20th December 2015
1618       </div>
1619       <div class="body">
1620         <p>Around three years ago, I created
1621 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the isenkram
1622 system</a> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
1623 hardware related packages.  A GUI system in the isenkram package will
1624 present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
1625 relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine.  The same
1626 lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
1627 tools in the isenkram-cli package.  In addition to mapping hardware,
1628 it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
1629 install needed firmware packages automatically.  The key for this
1630 system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
1631 words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
1632 with.</p>
1633
1634 <p>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
1635 adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
1636 time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
1637 I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
1638 the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
1639 was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
1640 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
1641 appstream system</a> was announced.  I got in touch and suggested to
1642 add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
1643 appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
1644 Debian version of appstream.</p>
1645
1646 <p>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
1647 and today I uploaded a new version 0.20 of isenkram adding support for
1648 appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages.  The only
1649 package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
1650 pymissile package.  I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
1651 how do add the required
1652 <a href="https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html">metadata
1653 in pymissile</a>.  I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
1654 this content:</p>
1655
1656 <blockquote><pre>
1657 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
1658 &lt;component&gt;
1659   &lt;id&gt;pymissile&lt;/id&gt;
1660   &lt;metadata_license&gt;MIT&lt;/metadata_license&gt;
1661   &lt;name&gt;pymissile&lt;/name&gt;
1662   &lt;summary&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher&lt;/summary&gt;
1663   &lt;description&gt;
1664     &lt;p&gt;
1665       Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
1666       Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
1667       motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
1668       launcher.
1669     &lt;/p&gt;
1670   &lt;/description&gt;
1671   &lt;provides&gt;
1672     &lt;modalias&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*&lt;/modalias&gt;
1673   &lt;/provides&gt;
1674 &lt;/component&gt;
1675 </pre></blockquote>
1676
1677 <p>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
1678 which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
1679 (modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel.  In this case, it
1680 will map to all USB devices with vendor code 1130 and product code
1681 0202.</p>
1682
1683 <p>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
1684 are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
1685 appstream files.  Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
1686 these files.  A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
1687 it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
1688 (in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use).  But
1689 it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
1690 upstream for this project is dormant.</p>
1691
1692 <p>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
1693 mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
1694 appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
1695 package under /usr/share/appdata/.  I did this by adding the following
1696 line to debian/pymissile.install:</p>
1697
1698 <blockquote><pre>
1699 debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
1700 </pre></blockquote>
1701
1702 <p>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
1703 all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
1704 pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
1705 installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
1706 question.</p>
1707
1708 <p>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
1709 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a> proposal.</p>
1710
1711 <p>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
1712 try running this command on the command line:</p>
1713
1714 <blockquote><pre>
1715 cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
1716 </pre></blockquote>
1717
1718 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
1719 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
1720 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
1721
1722       </div>
1723       <div class="tags">
1724
1725
1726         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
1727
1728
1729       </div>
1730     </div>
1731     <div class="padding"></div>
1732
1733     <div class="entry">
1734       <div class="title">
1735         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_GNU_General_Public_License_is_not_magic_pixie_dust.html">The GNU General Public License is not magic pixie dust</a>
1736       </div>
1737       <div class="date">
1738         30th November 2015
1739       </div>
1740       <div class="body">
1741         <p>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
1742 "<a href="http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2015/11/27/sfc-supporter/">The
1743 GPL is not magic pixie dust</a>" explain the importance of making sure
1744 the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GPL</a> is enforced.
1745 I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:<p>
1746
1747 <blockquote>
1748
1749 <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>
1750
1751 <blockquote>
1752 The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.<br/>
1753
1754 The first step is to choose a
1755 <a href="https://copyleft.org/">copyleft</a> license for your
1756 code.<br/>
1757
1758 The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
1759 <b>it must be enforced</b><br/>
1760
1761 and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
1762 work<br/>
1763
1764 is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
1765 </blockquote>
1766
1767 <p><small>-- <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/">Bradley Kuhn</a>, in
1768 <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in Freedom">FaiF</a>
1769 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode
1770 0x57</a></small></p>
1771
1772 <p>As the Debian Website
1773 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/794116">used</a>
1774 <a href="https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=1.24&amp;r2=1.25">to</a>
1775 imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
1776 the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
1777 software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
1778 software products.  Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
1779 to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
1780 such licenses are not enough.  With the ongoing adoption of Free
1781 Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's
1782 expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
1783 ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always.  As Karen
1784 and Bradley explained in <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in
1785 Freedom">FaiF</a>
1786 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode 0x57</a>,
1787 copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
1788 to protect it.  The reality of today's world is that legal
1789 representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming.  With
1790 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/">gpl-violations.org</a> in hiatus
1791 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/news/20151027-homepage-recovers/">until</a>
1792 some time in 2016, the <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/">Software
1793 Freedom Conservancy</a> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
1794 of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
1795 In March the SFC supported a
1796 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">lawsuit
1797 by Christoph Hellwig</a> against VMware for refusing to
1798 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html">comply
1799 with the GPL</a> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
1800 kernel.  Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
1801 conferences
1802 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">blocked
1803 or cancelled their talks</a>.  As a result they have decided to rely
1804 less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
1805 individuals who support Free Software and copyleft.  So the SFC has
1806 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/23/2015fundraiser/">launched</a>
1807 a <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">campaign</a> to create
1808 a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
1809 supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
1810 Software.</p>
1811
1812 <p>If you support Free Software,
1813 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/26/like-what-I-do/">like</a>
1814 what the SFC do, agree with their
1815 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html">compliance
1816 principles</a>, are happy about their
1817 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">successes</a> in 2015,
1818 work on a project that is an SFC
1819 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/">member</a> and or
1820 just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
1821 <a href="https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA">Christopher
1822 Allan Webber</a>,
1823 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">Carol
1824 Smith</a>,
1825 <a href="http://www.jonobacon.org/2015/11/25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/">Jono
1826 Bacon</a>, myself and
1827 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters">others</a> in
1828 becoming a
1829 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">supporter</a>.  For the
1830 next week your donation will be
1831 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/27/black-friday/">matched</a>
1832 by an anonymous donor.  Please also consider asking your employer to
1833 match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC.  Don't forget to
1834 spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
1835 social media accounts.</p>
1836
1837 </blockquote>
1838
1839 <p>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
1840 of Software Freedom Conservancy myself.  Perhaps you should be a
1841 supporter too?</p>
1842
1843       </div>
1844       <div class="tags">
1845
1846
1847         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
1848
1849
1850       </div>
1851     </div>
1852     <div class="padding"></div>
1853
1854     <div class="entry">
1855       <div class="title">
1856         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html">PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9</a>
1857       </div>
1858       <div class="date">
1859         17th November 2015
1860       </div>
1861       <div class="body">
1862         <p>I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
1863 set it up properly.  I wanted to generate it offline and have it
1864 available on <a href="http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp">a OpenPGP
1865 smart card</a> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
1866 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever.  But
1867 finally I've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
1868 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key.  See
1869 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-11-17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt">the
1870 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key</a> for
1871 the details.  This is my new key:</p>
1872
1873 <pre>
1874 pub   3936R/<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/111D6B29EE4E02F9.html">111D6B29EE4E02F9</a> 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-14]
1875       Key fingerprint = 3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87 78F1  D827 111D 6B29 EE4E 02F9
1876 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@hungry.com&gt;
1877 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@debian.org&gt;
1878 sub   4096R/87BAFB0E 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
1879 sub   4096R/F91E6DE9 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
1880 sub   4096R/A0439BAB 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
1881 </pre>
1882
1883 <p>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
1884 my old key.</p>
1885
1886 <p>If you signed my old key
1887 (<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html">DB4CCC4B2A30D729</a>),
1888 I'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
1889 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
1890 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.</p>
1891
1892       </div>
1893       <div class="tags">
1894
1895
1896         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
1897
1898
1899       </div>
1900     </div>
1901     <div class="padding"></div>
1902
1903     <div class="entry">
1904       <div class="title">
1905         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">The life and death of a laptop battery</a>
1906       </div>
1907       <div class="date">
1908         24th September 2015
1909       </div>
1910       <div class="body">
1911         <p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
1912 But this do not last.  The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
1913 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
1914 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
1915 all the time.  Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
1916 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
1917 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
1918
1919 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
1920
1921 <p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
1922 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
1923 by someone else.  I found
1924 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
1925 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
1926 broken.  I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
1927 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
1928 from him.  Via
1929 <a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
1930 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
1931 discovered
1932 <a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
1933 available in Debian.</p>
1934
1935 <p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
1936 battery stats ever since. Now my
1937 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
1938 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
1939 when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity.  My
1940 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
1941
1942 <pre>
1943 #!/bin/sh
1944 # Inspired by
1945 # http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
1946 # See also
1947 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
1948 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
1949
1950 files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
1951     energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
1952
1953 if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
1954     (
1955         printf "timestamp,"
1956         for f in $files; do
1957             printf "%s," $f
1958         done
1959         echo
1960     ) > "$logfile"
1961 fi
1962
1963 log_battery() {
1964     # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
1965     # when several log processes run in parallel.
1966     msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
1967         for f in $files; do \
1968             printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
1969         done)
1970     echo "$msg"
1971 }
1972
1973 cd /sys/class/power_supply
1974
1975 for bat in BAT*; do
1976     (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
1977 done
1978 </pre>
1979
1980 <p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
1981 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
1982 and out of hibernation and suspend.  In addition, it collect a value
1983 every 10 minutes.  This make it possible for me know when the battery
1984 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
1985 The code for the Debian package
1986 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
1987 available on github</a>.</p>
1988
1989 <p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
1990
1991 <pre>
1992 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
1993 1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
1994 [...]
1995 1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
1996 1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
1997 </pre>
1998
1999 <p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
2000 over time.  This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
2001 battery.</p>
2002
2003 <p>But why is this happening?  Why are my laptop batteries always
2004 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
2005 satellites keep working year after year.  If we are to believe
2006 <a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
2007 University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
2008 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
2009 all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
2010 I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
2011 <a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
2012 the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
2013 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
2014 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
2015 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
2016 Linux too.</p>
2017
2018 <p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
2019 stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
2020 preparation for a longer trip?  I found
2021 <a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
2022 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
2023 80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
2024 load).</p>
2025
2026 <p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
2027 at the start.  I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
2028 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
2029 back to design capacity.  And I wonder if the discharge and charge
2030 speed change over time, or if this stay the same.  I did not yet try
2031 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
2032 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
2033 those.</p>
2034
2035 <p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
2036 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
2037 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
2038 initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
2039 and stop.  I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
2040 and need to be replaced.  The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
2041 specific.</p>
2042
2043       </div>
2044       <div class="tags">
2045
2046
2047         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2048
2049
2050       </div>
2051     </div>
2052     <div class="padding"></div>
2053
2054     <div class="entry">
2055       <div class="title">
2056         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_laptop___some_more_clues_and_ideas_based_on_feedback.html">New laptop - some more clues and ideas based on feedback</a>
2057       </div>
2058       <div class="date">
2059          5th July 2015
2060       </div>
2061       <div class="body">
2062         <p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
2063 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback.  I wish to
2064 thank every one of these.  Several pointed me to the possibility of
2065 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
2066 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
2067 machine.  But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
2068 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
2069 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement.  If I did
2070 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
2071 using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
2072 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
2073
2074 <p>One tip I got was to use the
2075 <a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
2076 compare laptop models.  It seem to have more models available than
2077 prisjakt.no.  Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
2078 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
2079 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
2080 keyboards I tested.  Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
2081
2082 <p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
2083 newest Thinkpad X model.  The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
2084 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
2085 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
2086 <a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>.  The reports I
2087 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent.  Some say the keyboard
2088 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
2089 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
2090 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
2091 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
2092 replace it.  I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
2093 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230.  I'm
2094 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
2095 noisy.  In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
2096 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
2097
2098 <p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
2099 <a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
2100 <a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
2101 The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
2102
2103 <p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback.  It help a lot
2104 as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
2105
2106 <p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
2107 <a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops.  They got several
2108 different
2109 <a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
2110 thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
2111
2112       </div>
2113       <div class="tags">
2114
2115
2116         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2117
2118
2119       </div>
2120     </div>
2121     <div class="padding"></div>
2122
2123     <div class="entry">
2124       <div class="title">
2125         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_find_a_new_laptop__as_the_old_one_is_broken_after_only_two_years.html">Time to find a new laptop, as the old one is broken after only two years</a>
2126       </div>
2127       <div class="date">
2128          3rd July 2015
2129       </div>
2130       <div class="body">
2131         <p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
2132 replacement soon.  The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
2133 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
2134 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
2135 flickering.</p>
2136
2137 <p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
2138 still as
2139 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
2140 described them in 2013</a>.  The last time I bought a laptop, I had
2141 good help from
2142 <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
2143 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
2144 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually.  Three button mouse
2145 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
2146 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
2147 G2) lack three mouse buttons).  It is also unclear to me how good the
2148 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are.  I hope Lenovo have not messed up
2149 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
2150 deteriorated since X41.</p>
2151
2152 <p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
2153 seem sensible to me?  Are there better services around to search the
2154 set of available laptops for features?  Please send me an email if you
2155 have suggestions.</p>
2156
2157 <p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
2158 <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
2159 of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
2160
2161       </div>
2162       <div class="tags">
2163
2164
2165         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2166
2167
2168       </div>
2169     </div>
2170     <div class="padding"></div>
2171
2172     <div class="entry">
2173       <div class="title">
2174         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_stay_with_sysvinit_in_Debian_Jessie.html">How to stay with sysvinit in Debian Jessie</a>
2175       </div>
2176       <div class="date">
2177         22nd November 2014
2178       </div>
2179       <div class="body">
2180         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
2181 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
2182 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
2183 courtesy of
2184 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
2185 Schubert</a> and
2186 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
2187 McVittie</a>.
2188
2189 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
2190 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
2191 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
2192 you upgrade:</p>
2193
2194 <p><blockquote><pre>
2195 Package: systemd-sysv
2196 Pin: release o=Debian
2197 Pin-Priority: -1
2198 </pre></blockquote><p>
2199
2200 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
2201 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
2202 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
2203 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
2204 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
2205
2206 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
2207 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
2208 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
2209 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
2210 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
2211 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
2212
2213 <p><blockquote><pre>
2214 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
2215 </pre></blockquote><p>
2216
2217 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
2218
2219 <p><blockquote><pre>
2220 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
2221 </pre></blockquote><p>
2222
2223 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
2224 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
2225
2226 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
2227 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
2228 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
2229 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
2230 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
2231 Jessie is released.</p>
2232
2233 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
2234 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
2235 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
2236 line.</p>
2237
2238       </div>
2239       <div class="tags">
2240
2241
2242         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2243
2244
2245       </div>
2246     </div>
2247     <div class="padding"></div>
2248
2249     <div class="entry">
2250       <div class="title">
2251         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Debian_package_for_SMTP_via_Tor__aka_SMTorP__using_exim4.html">A Debian package for SMTP via Tor (aka SMTorP) using exim4</a>
2252       </div>
2253       <div class="date">
2254         10th November 2014
2255       </div>
2256       <div class="body">
2257         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
2258 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
2259 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
2260
2261 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
2262 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
2263 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
2264 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
2265 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
2266 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
2267 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
2268 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
2269 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
2270 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
2271 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
2272 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
2273 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
2274 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
2275 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
2276
2277 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
2278 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
2279 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
2280 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
2281 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
2282 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
2283 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
2284 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
2285 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
2286 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
2287 were fairly easy, and
2288 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
2289 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
2290 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
2291 useful approach.</p>
2292
2293 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
2294 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
2295 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
2296 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
2297 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
2298 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
2299 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
2300 this:</p>
2301
2302 <p><blockquote><pre>
2303 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
2304   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
2305 </pre></blockquote></p>
2306
2307 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
2308 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
2309
2310 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
2311 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
2312 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
2313 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
2314 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
2315 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
2316 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
2317 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
2318 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
2319 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
2320 system.</p>
2321
2322 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
2323 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
2324 SMTorP. :)</p>
2325
2326       </div>
2327       <div class="tags">
2328
2329
2330         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
2331
2332
2333       </div>
2334     </div>
2335     <div class="padding"></div>
2336
2337     <div class="entry">
2338       <div class="title">
2339         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/listadmin__the_quick_way_to_moderate_mailman_lists___nice_free_software.html">listadmin, the quick way to moderate mailman lists - nice free software</a>
2340       </div>
2341       <div class="date">
2342         22nd October 2014
2343       </div>
2344       <div class="body">
2345         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
2346 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
2347 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
2348 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
2349 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
2350 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
2351 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
2352 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
2353 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
2354 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
2355 lists I recently took over:</p>
2356
2357 <p><blockquote><pre>
2358 % time listadmin xiph
2359 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
2360 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
2361
2362 real    0m1.709s
2363 user    0m0.232s
2364 sys     0m0.012s
2365 %
2366 </pre></blockquote></p>
2367
2368 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
2369 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
2370 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
2371 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
2372 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
2373 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
2374 program.</p>
2375
2376 <p>If you install
2377 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
2378 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
2379 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
2380
2381 <p><blockquote><pre>
2382 username username@example.org
2383 spamlevel 23
2384 default discard
2385 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
2386
2387 password secret
2388 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
2389 mailman-list@lists.example.com
2390
2391 password hidden
2392 other-list@otherserver.example.org
2393 </pre></blockquote></p>
2394
2395 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
2396 learn the details.</p>
2397
2398 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
2399 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
2400 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
2401 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
2402
2403 <p><blockquote><pre>
2404 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
2405 </pre></blockquote></p>
2406
2407 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
2408 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
2409 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
2410 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
2411 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
2412 email.</p>
2413
2414 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
2415 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
2416 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
2417 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
2418 software.</p>
2419
2420 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2421 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2422 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2423
2424 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
2425 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
2426 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
2427 sure why.</p>
2428
2429       </div>
2430       <div class="tags">
2431
2432
2433         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
2434
2435
2436       </div>
2437     </div>
2438     <div class="padding"></div>
2439
2440     <div class="entry">
2441       <div class="title">
2442         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
2443       </div>
2444       <div class="date">
2445         17th October 2014
2446       </div>
2447       <div class="body">
2448         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
2449 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
2450 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
2451 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
2452 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
2453 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
2454 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
2455
2456 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
2457 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
2458 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
2459 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
2460 of this story.)</p>
2461
2462 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
2463 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
2464 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
2465 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
2466 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
2467 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
2468 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
2469 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
2470 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
2471 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
2472
2473 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
2474 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
2475 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
2476 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
2477
2478 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
2479 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
2480
2481 <p><blockquote><pre>
2482 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
2483 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
2484 </pre></blockquote></p>
2485
2486 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
2487 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
2488 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
2489 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
2490 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
2491 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
2492 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
2493 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
2494
2495 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
2496 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
2497
2498 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
2499 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
2500 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
2501 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
2502 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
2503
2504 <p><blockquote><pre>
2505 Task: isenkram-packages
2506 Section: hardware
2507 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
2508  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
2509  proposed.
2510 Test-new-install: show show
2511 Relevance: 8
2512 Packages: for-current-hardware
2513
2514 Task: isenkram-firmware
2515 Section: hardware
2516 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
2517  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
2518  packages are proposed.
2519 Test-new-install: mark show
2520 Relevance: 8
2521 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
2522 </pre></blockquote></p>
2523
2524 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
2525 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
2526 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
2527 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
2528 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
2529
2530 <p><blockquote><pre>
2531 #!/bin/sh
2532 #
2533 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
2534 export PATH
2535 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
2536 </pre></blockquote></p>
2537
2538 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
2539 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
2540
2541 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
2542 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
2543 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
2544 install.</p>
2545
2546 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
2547 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
2548 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
2549
2550       </div>
2551       <div class="tags">
2552
2553
2554         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
2555
2556
2557       </div>
2558     </div>
2559     <div class="padding"></div>
2560
2561     <div class="entry">
2562       <div class="title">
2563         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ubuntu_used_to_show_the_bread_prizes_at_ICA_Storo.html">Ubuntu used to show the bread prizes at ICA Storo</a>
2564       </div>
2565       <div class="date">
2566          4th October 2014
2567       </div>
2568       <div class="body">
2569         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
2570 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
2571 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
2572 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
2573
2574 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
2575
2576 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
2577 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
2578 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
2579
2580       </div>
2581       <div class="tags">
2582
2583
2584         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2585
2586
2587       </div>
2588     </div>
2589     <div class="padding"></div>
2590
2591     <div class="entry">
2592       <div class="title">
2593         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_version_0_17_is_ready.html">New lsdvd release version 0.17 is ready</a>
2594       </div>
2595       <div class="date">
2596          4th October 2014
2597       </div>
2598       <div class="body">
2599         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
2600 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
2601 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
2602 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
2603 Dibb.</p>
2604
2605 <p>I just wrapped up
2606 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
2607 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
2608 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
2609 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
2610 0.17.</p>
2611
2612 <ul>
2613
2614  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
2615  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
2616    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
2617  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
2618  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
2619  <li>Fix include orders</li>
2620  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
2621  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
2622  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
2623    the palette size is the same.</li>
2624  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
2625  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
2626  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
2627  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
2628    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
2629
2630 </ul>
2631
2632 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
2633 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
2634 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
2635
2636       </div>
2637       <div class="tags">
2638
2639
2640         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
2641
2642
2643       </div>
2644     </div>
2645     <div class="padding"></div>
2646
2647     <div class="entry">
2648       <div class="title">
2649         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_Debian_Edu_Jessie_despite_some_fatal_problems_with_the_installer.html">How to test Debian Edu Jessie despite some fatal problems with the installer</a>
2650       </div>
2651       <div class="date">
2652         26th September 2014
2653       </div>
2654       <div class="body">
2655         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
2656 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
2657 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
2658 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
2659 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
2660 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
2661 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
2662 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
2663 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
2664 future.  The
2665 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
2666 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
2667 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
2668 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
2669 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
2670
2671 <p>First, download the test ISO via
2672 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
2673 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
2674 or rsync (use
2675 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
2676 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
2677 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
2678 install with some tweaking.</p>
2679
2680 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
2681 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
2682
2683 <p><blockquote><pre>
2684 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
2685 </pre></blockquote></p>
2686
2687 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
2688 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
2689 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
2690 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
2691
2692 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
2693 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
2694 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
2695 your need.</p>
2696
2697 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
2698 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
2699 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
2700 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
2701 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
2702 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
2703 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
2704 days.</p>
2705
2706 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
2707 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
2708 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
2709 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
2710 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
2711 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
2712 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
2713 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
2714 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
2715
2716 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
2717 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
2718 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
2719
2720       </div>
2721       <div class="tags">
2722
2723
2724         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2725
2726
2727       </div>
2728     </div>
2729     <div class="padding"></div>
2730
2731     <div class="entry">
2732       <div class="title">
2733         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Suddenly_I_am_the_new_upstream_of_the_lsdvd_command_line_tool.html">Suddenly I am the new upstream of the lsdvd command line tool</a>
2734       </div>
2735       <div class="date">
2736         25th September 2014
2737       </div>
2738       <div class="body">
2739         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
2740 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
2741 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
2742 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
2743 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
2744 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
2745 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
2746 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
2747 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
2748 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
2749 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
2750 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
2751 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
2752
2753 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
2754 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
2755 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
2756 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
2757 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
2758 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
2759 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
2760 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
2761 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
2762 list</a>. :)</p>
2763
2764       </div>
2765       <div class="tags">
2766
2767
2768         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
2769
2770
2771       </div>
2772     </div>
2773     <div class="padding"></div>
2774
2775     <div class="entry">
2776       <div class="title">
2777         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">Speeding up the Debian installer using eatmydata and dpkg-divert</a>
2778       </div>
2779       <div class="date">
2780         16th September 2014
2781       </div>
2782       <div class="body">
2783         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
2784 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
2785 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
2786 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
2787 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
2788 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
2789 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
2790 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
2791 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
2792 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
2793 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
2794 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
2795 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
2796 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
2797
2798 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
2799 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
2800 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
2801 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
2802 depend on the small and clever package
2803 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
2804 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
2805 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
2806 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
2807 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
2808 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
2809 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
2810 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
2811 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
2812 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
2813 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
2814
2815 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
2816 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
2817 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
2818 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
2819 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
2820 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
2821 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
2822 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
2823 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
2824 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
2825 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
2826 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
2827 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
2828 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
2829 dialog.</p>
2830
2831 <p><table>
2832
2833 <tr>
2834 <th>Machine/setup</th>
2835 <th>Original tasksel</th>
2836 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
2837 <th>Reduction</th>
2838 </tr>
2839
2840 <tr>
2841 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
2842 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
2843 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
2844 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
2845 </tr>
2846
2847 <tr>
2848 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
2849 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
2850 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
2851 <td>23 min 40%</td>
2852 </tr>
2853
2854 <tr>
2855 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
2856 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
2857 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
2858 <td>11 min 50%</td>
2859 </tr>
2860
2861 <tr>
2862 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
2863 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
2864 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
2865 <td>2 min 33%</td>
2866 </tr>
2867
2868 <tr>
2869 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
2870 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
2871 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
2872 <td>4 min 21%</td>
2873 </tr>
2874
2875 </table></p>
2876
2877 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
2878 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
2879 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
2880 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
2881 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
2882 installed.</p>
2883
2884 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
2885 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
2886 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
2887 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
2888 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
2889 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
2890 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
2891 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
2892 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
2893 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
2894 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
2895 for the entire installation.</p>
2896
2897 <p>I've implemented this in the
2898 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
2899 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
2900 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
2901 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
2902 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
2903
2904 <p><blockquote><pre>
2905 #!/bin/sh
2906 set -e
2907 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
2908 info() {
2909     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
2910 }
2911 error() {
2912     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
2913 }
2914 override_install() {
2915     apt-install eatmydata || true
2916     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
2917         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
2918             file=/usr/bin/$bin
2919             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
2920             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
2921                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
2922                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
2923                     > /target$file.edu
2924                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
2925                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
2926                     --rename --quiet --add $file
2927                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
2928             else
2929                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
2930             fi
2931         done
2932     else
2933         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
2934     fi
2935 }
2936
2937 override_install
2938 </pre></blockquote></p>
2939
2940 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
2941 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
2942
2943 <p><blockquote><pre>
2944 #! /bin/sh -e
2945 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
2946 error() {
2947     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
2948 }
2949 remove_install_override() {
2950     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
2951         file=/usr/bin/$bin
2952         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
2953             rm /target$file
2954             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
2955                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
2956             rm /target$file.edu
2957         else
2958             error "Missing divert for $file."
2959         fi
2960     done
2961     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
2962 }
2963
2964 remove_install_override
2965 </pre></blockquote></p>
2966
2967 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
2968 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
2969 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
2970
2971 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
2972 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
2973 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
2974 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
2975 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
2976 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
2977 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
2978 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
2979 everyone.</p>
2980
2981 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
2982 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
2983 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
2984 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
2985
2986 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
2987 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
2988 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
2989 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
2990 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
2991
2992 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
2993 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
2994 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
2995 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
2996 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
2997
2998       </div>
2999       <div class="tags">
3000
3001
3002         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3003
3004
3005       </div>
3006     </div>
3007     <div class="padding"></div>
3008
3009     <div class="entry">
3010       <div class="title">
3011         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_bye_subkeys_pgp_net__welcome_pool_sks_keyservers_net.html">Good bye subkeys.pgp.net, welcome pool.sks-keyservers.net</a>
3012       </div>
3013       <div class="date">
3014         10th September 2014
3015       </div>
3016       <div class="body">
3017         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
3018 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
3019 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
3020 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
3021 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
3022 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
3023 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
3024 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
3025 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
3026 those problems are gone now.</p>
3027
3028 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
3029 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
3030 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
3031 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
3032 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
3033
3034 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
3035 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
3036 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
3037
3038 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
3039 line:</p>
3040
3041 <p><blockquote><pre>
3042 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
3043 </pre></blockquote></p>
3044
3045 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
3046 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
3047 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
3048 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
3049
3050 <p><blockquote><pre>
3051 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
3052 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
3053 %
3054 </pre></blockquote></p>
3055
3056 <p>Now if only
3057 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
3058 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
3059 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
3060 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
3061 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
3062 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
3063 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
3064 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
3065 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
3066
3067       </div>
3068       <div class="tags">
3069
3070
3071         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
3072
3073
3074       </div>
3075     </div>
3076     <div class="padding"></div>
3077
3078     <div class="entry">
3079       <div class="title">
3080         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html">From English wiki to translated PDF and epub via Docbook</a>
3081       </div>
3082       <div class="date">
3083         17th June 2014
3084       </div>
3085       <div class="body">
3086         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
3087 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
3088 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
3089 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
3090 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
3091
3092 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
3093 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
3094 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
3095 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
3096 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
3097 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
3098 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
3099 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
3100 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
3101 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
3102 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
3103 goals.</p>
3104
3105 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
3106 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
3107 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
3108 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
3109 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
3110 chapters together into one large web page (aka
3111 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
3112 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
3113 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
3114 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
3115 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
3116 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
3117 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
3118 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
3119 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
3120 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
3121 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
3122 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
3123 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
3124 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
3125 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
3126 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
3127 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
3128 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
3129
3130 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
3131 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
3132 track the English original.  For this we use the
3133 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
3134 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
3135 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
3136 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
3137 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
3138 files), which the translations update with the native language
3139 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
3140 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
3141 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
3142 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
3143 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
3144 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
3145 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
3146 of the documentation.</p>
3147
3148 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
3149 recommend using
3150 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
3151 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
3152 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
3153 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
3154 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
3155 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
3156 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
3157 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
3158
3159 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
3160 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
3161 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
3162 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
3163 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
3164 translated images by storing translated versions in
3165 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
3166 package maintainers know more.</p>
3167
3168 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
3169 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
3170 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
3171 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
3172 PDF version</a> or the
3173 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
3174 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
3175 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
3176
3177 <p>To learn more, check out
3178 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
3179 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
3180 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
3181 manual on the wiki</a> and
3182 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
3183 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
3184
3185       </div>
3186       <div class="tags">
3187
3188
3189         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3190
3191
3192       </div>
3193     </div>
3194     <div class="padding"></div>
3195
3196     <div class="entry">
3197       <div class="title">
3198         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Install_hardware_dependent_packages_using_tasksel__Isenkram_0_7_.html">Install hardware dependent packages using tasksel (Isenkram 0.7)</a>
3199       </div>
3200       <div class="date">
3201         23rd April 2014
3202       </div>
3203       <div class="body">
3204         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
3205 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
3206 So I implemented one, using
3207 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
3208 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
3209 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
3210 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
3211 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
3212 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
3213
3214 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
3215 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
3216 packages to install.  The first part is in
3217 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
3218 this:</p>
3219
3220 <p><blockquote><pre>
3221 Task: isenkram
3222 Section: hardware
3223 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
3224  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
3225  proposed.
3226 Test-new-install: mark show
3227 Relevance: 8
3228 Packages: for-current-hardware
3229 </pre></blockquote></p>
3230
3231 <p>The second part is in
3232 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
3233 this:</p>
3234
3235 <p><blockquote><pre>
3236 #!/bin/sh
3237 #
3238 (
3239     isenkram-lookup
3240     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
3241 ) | sort -u
3242 </pre></blockquote></p>
3243
3244 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
3245 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
3246 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
3247 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
3248 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
3249 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
3250
3251 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
3252 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
3253 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
3254 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
3255 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
3256 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
3257 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
3258 the python-apt code (bug
3259 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
3260 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
3261 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
3262 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
3263 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
3264 unstable today.</p>
3265
3266 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
3267 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
3268 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
3269 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
3270 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
3271 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
3272 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
3273 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
3274 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
3275
3276 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
3277 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
3278 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
3279 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
3280 package.  See also
3281 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
3282 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
3283 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
3284 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
3285
3286       </div>
3287       <div class="tags">
3288
3289
3290         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
3291
3292
3293       </div>
3294     </div>
3295     <div class="padding"></div>
3296
3297     <div class="entry">
3298       <div class="title">
3299         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html">FreedomBox milestone - all packages now in Debian Sid</a>
3300       </div>
3301       <div class="date">
3302         15th April 2014
3303       </div>
3304       <div class="body">
3305         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
3306 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
3307 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
3308 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
3309 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
3310 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
3311
3312 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
3313 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
3314 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
3315 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
3316 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
3317 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
3318 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
3319
3320 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
3321 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
3322 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
3323 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
3324 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
3325 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
3326 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
3327 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
3328 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
3329 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
3330 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
3331 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
3332
3333 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
3334 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
3335 become root:</p>
3336
3337 <p><pre>
3338 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
3339   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
3340   u-boot-tools
3341 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
3342   freedom-maker
3343 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
3344 </pre></p>
3345
3346 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
3347 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
3348 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
3349 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
3350 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
3351 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
3352 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
3353 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
3354
3355 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
3356 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
3357 the preseed values:</p>
3358
3359 <p><pre>
3360 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
3361 </pre></p>
3362
3363 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
3364 it still work.</p>
3365
3366 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
3367 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
3368 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
3369 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
3370 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
3371 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
3372 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
3373
3374 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
3375 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
3376 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
3377 irc.debian.org)</a> and
3378 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
3379 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
3380
3381       </div>
3382       <div class="tags">
3383
3384
3385         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
3386
3387
3388       </div>
3389     </div>
3390     <div class="padding"></div>
3391
3392     <div class="entry">
3393       <div class="title">
3394         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html">S3QL, a locally mounted cloud file system - nice free software</a>
3395       </div>
3396       <div class="date">
3397          9th April 2014
3398       </div>
3399       <div class="body">
3400         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
3401 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
3402 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
3403 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
3404 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
3405 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
3406 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
3407 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
3408 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
3409 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
3410 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
3411 have looked at a system called
3412 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
3413 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
3414
3415 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
3416 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
3417 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
3418 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
3419 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
3420 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
3421 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
3422 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
3423 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
3424 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
3425 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
3426 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
3427 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
3428
3429 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
3430 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
3431 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
3432 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
3433 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
3434 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
3435 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
3436 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
3437 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
3438 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
3439 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
3440 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
3441 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
3442 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
3443 account.</p>
3444
3445 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
3446 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
3447 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
3448 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
3449 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
3450 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
3451 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
3452
3453 <p><blockquote><pre>
3454 [s3c]
3455 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
3456 backend-login: API-login
3457 backend-password: API-password
3458 fs-passphrase: local-password
3459 </pre></blockquote></p>
3460
3461 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
3462 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
3463 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
3464 details and password to create it:</p>
3465
3466 <p><blockquote><pre>
3467 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
3468 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
3469   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
3470 Enter backend login:
3471 Enter backend password:
3472 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
3473 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
3474 Enter encryption password:
3475 Confirm encryption password:
3476 Generating random encryption key...
3477 Creating metadata tables...
3478 Dumping metadata...
3479 ..objects..
3480 ..blocks..
3481 ..inodes..
3482 ..inode_blocks..
3483 ..symlink_targets..
3484 ..names..
3485 ..contents..
3486 ..ext_attributes..
3487 Compressing and uploading metadata...
3488 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
3489 # </pre></blockquote></p>
3490
3491 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
3492
3493 <p><blockquote><pre>
3494 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
3495   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
3496 Using 4 upload threads.
3497 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
3498 Reading metadata...
3499 ..objects..
3500 ..blocks..
3501 ..inodes..
3502 ..inode_blocks..
3503 ..symlink_targets..
3504 ..names..
3505 ..contents..
3506 ..ext_attributes..
3507 Mounting filesystem...
3508 # df -h /s3ql
3509 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
3510 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
3511 #
3512 </pre></blockquote></p>
3513
3514 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
3515 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
3516 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
3517 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
3518 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
3519 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
3520
3521 <p><blockquote><pre>
3522 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
3523 #
3524 </pre></blockquote></p>
3525
3526 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
3527 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
3528 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
3529 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
3530 file system:</p>
3531
3532 <p><blockquote><pre>
3533 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
3534 Using cached metadata.
3535 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
3536 Checking DB integrity...
3537 Creating temporary extra indices...
3538 Checking lost+found...
3539 Checking cached objects...
3540 Checking names (refcounts)...
3541 Checking contents (names)...
3542 Checking contents (inodes)...
3543 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
3544 Checking objects (reference counts)...
3545 Checking objects (backend)...
3546 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
3547 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
3548 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
3549 Checking objects (sizes)...
3550 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
3551 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
3552 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
3553 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
3554 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
3555 Checking inodes (sizes)...
3556 Checking extended attributes (names)...
3557 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
3558 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
3559 Checking directory reachability...
3560 Checking unix conventions...
3561 Checking referential integrity...
3562 Dropping temporary indices...
3563 Backing up old metadata...
3564 Dumping metadata...
3565 ..objects..
3566 ..blocks..
3567 ..inodes..
3568 ..inode_blocks..
3569 ..symlink_targets..
3570 ..names..
3571 ..contents..
3572 ..ext_attributes..
3573 Compressing and uploading metadata...
3574 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
3575 #
3576 </pre></blockquote></p>
3577
3578 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
3579 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
3580 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
3581 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
3582 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
3583 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
3584 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
3585 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
3586 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
3587 working set.</p>
3588
3589 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
3590 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
3591 busy:</p>
3592
3593 <p><blockquote><pre>
3594 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
3595   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
3596 Using 8 upload threads.
3597 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
3598 #
3599 </pre></blockquote></p>
3600
3601 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
3602 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
3603 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
3604 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
3605 s3qlctrl:
3606
3607 <p><blockquote><pre>
3608 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
3609 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
3610 #
3611 </pre></blockquote></p>
3612
3613 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
3614 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
3615 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
3616 a report:</p>
3617
3618 <p><blockquote><pre>
3619 # s3qlstat /s3ql
3620 Directory entries:    9141
3621 Inodes:               9143
3622 Data blocks:          8851
3623 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
3624 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
3625 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
3626 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
3627 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
3628 #
3629 </pre></blockquote></p>
3630
3631 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
3632 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
3633 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
3634 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
3635 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
3636 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
3637 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
3638 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
3639 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
3640 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
3641 best.</p>
3642
3643 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
3644 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
3645 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
3646 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
3647 poster is titled
3648 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
3649 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
3650 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
3651 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
3652 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
3653
3654 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
3655 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
3656 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
3657 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
3658 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
3659 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
3660 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
3661 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
3662
3663 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
3664 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
3665 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
3666 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
3667 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
3668 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
3669 only read from it.</p>
3670
3671 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3672 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3673 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3674
3675       </div>
3676       <div class="tags">
3677
3678
3679         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
3680
3681
3682       </div>
3683     </div>
3684     <div class="padding"></div>
3685
3686     <div class="entry">
3687       <div class="title">
3688         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Freedombox_on_Dreamplug__Raspberry_Pi_and_virtual_x86_machine.html">Freedombox on Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and virtual x86 machine</a>
3689       </div>
3690       <div class="date">
3691         14th March 2014
3692       </div>
3693       <div class="body">
3694         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
3695 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
3696 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
3697 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
3698 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
3699 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
3700 release (0.2).</p>
3701
3702 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
3703 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
3704 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
3705 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
3706 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
3707 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
3708 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
3709 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
3710 and build using
3711 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
3712 with a user with sudo access to become root:
3713
3714 <pre>
3715 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
3716   freedom-maker
3717 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
3718   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
3719   u-boot-tools
3720 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
3721 </pre>
3722
3723 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
3724 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
3725 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
3726 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
3727 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
3728 kpartx call.</p>
3729
3730 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
3731 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
3732 the preseed values:</p>
3733
3734 <pre>
3735 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
3736 </pre>
3737
3738 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
3739 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
3740 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
3741 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
3742 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
3743 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
3744
3745 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
3746 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
3747 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
3748 irc.debian.org)</a> and
3749 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
3750 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
3751
3752       </div>
3753       <div class="tags">
3754
3755
3756         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
3757
3758
3759       </div>
3760     </div>
3761     <div class="padding"></div>
3762
3763     <div class="entry">
3764       <div class="title">
3765         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_home_and_release_1_0_for_netgroup_and_innetgr__aka_ng_utils_.html">New home and release 1.0 for netgroup and innetgr (aka ng-utils)</a>
3766       </div>
3767       <div class="date">
3768         22nd February 2014
3769       </div>
3770       <div class="body">
3771         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
3772 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
3773 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
3774 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
3775 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
3776 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
3777 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
3778 proper home since then.</p>
3779
3780 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
3781 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
3782 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
3783 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
3784 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
3785
3786 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
3787 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
3788 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
3789 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
3790 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
3791 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
3792 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
3793 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
3794 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
3795
3796       </div>
3797       <div class="tags">
3798
3799
3800         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3801
3802
3803       </div>
3804     </div>
3805     <div class="padding"></div>
3806
3807     <div class="entry">
3808       <div class="title">
3809         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
3810       </div>
3811       <div class="date">
3812          3rd February 2014
3813       </div>
3814       <div class="body">
3815         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
3816 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
3817 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
3818 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
3819 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
3820 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
3821 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
3822 <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>,
3823 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
3824
3825 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
3826 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
3827 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
3828 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
3829 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
3830 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
3831
3832 <p><blockquote><pre>
3833 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
3834 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
3835 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
3836 dhclient /dev/eth0
3837 </pre></blockquote></p>
3838
3839 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
3840 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
3841 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
3842
3843 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
3844 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
3845 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
3846 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
3847 side.</p>
3848
3849 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
3850 stuff:</p>
3851
3852 <p><blockquote><pre>
3853 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
3854 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
3855 EOF
3856 apt-get update
3857 apt-get dist-upgrade
3858 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
3859     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
3860 update-alternatives --config runsystem
3861 </pre></blockquote></p>
3862
3863 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
3864 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
3865 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
3866 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
3867 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
3868 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
3869 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
3870 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
3871 ssh instead.
3872
3873 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
3874 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
3875 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
3876 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
3877 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
3878 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
3879
3880 <p><blockquote><pre>
3881 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
3882 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
3883 EOF
3884 </pre></blockquote></p>
3885
3886 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
3887 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
3888 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
3889 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
3890
3891 <p><blockquote><pre>
3892 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
3893 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
3894 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
3895 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
3896 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
3897 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
3898 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
3899 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
3900 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
3901 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
3902 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
3903 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
3904 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
3905 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
3906 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
3907 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
3908 #
3909 </pre></blockquote></p>
3910
3911 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
3912 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
3913 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
3914 command line stuff.<p>
3915
3916       </div>
3917       <div class="tags">
3918
3919
3920         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3921
3922
3923       </div>
3924     </div>
3925     <div class="padding"></div>
3926
3927     <div class="entry">
3928       <div class="title">
3929         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
3930       </div>
3931       <div class="date">
3932         14th January 2014
3933       </div>
3934       <div class="body">
3935         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
3936 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
3937 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
3938 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
3939 the source.  The company behind it provide
3940 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
3941 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
3942 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
3943 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
3944 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
3945 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
3946 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
3947 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
3948 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
3949 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
3950 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
3951 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
3952 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
3953 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
3954 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
3955 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
3956 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
3957 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
3958 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
3959
3960 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
3961
3962 <ul>
3963
3964   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
3965   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
3966   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
3967
3968 </ul>
3969
3970 <p>You can
3971 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
3972 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
3973 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
3974 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
3975 include a test suite check.</p>
3976
3977       </div>
3978       <div class="tags">
3979
3980
3981         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3982
3983
3984       </div>
3985     </div>
3986     <div class="padding"></div>
3987
3988     <div class="entry">
3989       <div class="title">
3990         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
3991       </div>
3992       <div class="date">
3993         24th November 2013
3994       </div>
3995       <div class="body">
3996         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
3997 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
3998 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
3999 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
4000 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
4001 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
4002 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
4003 is working on.  I checked the
4004 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
4005 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
4006 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
4007 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
4008 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
4009 These are the release notes:</p>
4010
4011 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
4012
4013 <ul>
4014
4015   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
4016    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
4017    up.</li>
4018
4019   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
4020
4021   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
4022    Matthias Klose.</li>
4023
4024   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
4025    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
4026
4027   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
4028    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
4029    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
4030
4031 </ul>
4032
4033 <p>You can
4034 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
4035 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
4036 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
4037 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
4038 include a testsuite check.</p>
4039
4040       </div>
4041       <div class="tags">
4042
4043
4044         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4045
4046
4047       </div>
4048     </div>
4049     <div class="padding"></div>
4050
4051     <div class="entry">
4052       <div class="title">
4053         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_init_d_boot_script_example_for_rsyslog.html">Debian init.d boot script example for rsyslog</a>
4054       </div>
4055       <div class="date">
4056          2nd November 2013
4057       </div>
4058       <div class="body">
4059         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
4060 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
4061 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
4062 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
4063 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
4064
4065 <p><pre>
4066 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
4067 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
4068 # Provides:          rsyslog
4069 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
4070 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
4071 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
4072 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
4073 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
4074 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
4075 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
4076 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
4077 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
4078 ### END INIT INFO
4079 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
4080 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
4081 </pre></p>
4082
4083 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
4084 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
4085 info/comments.</p>
4086
4087 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
4088 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
4089
4090 <p><pre>
4091 #!/bin/sh
4092
4093 # Define LSB log_* functions.
4094 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
4095 # and status_of_proc is working.
4096 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
4097
4098 #
4099 # Function that starts the daemon/service
4100
4101 #
4102 do_start()
4103 {
4104         # Return
4105         #   0 if daemon has been started
4106         #   1 if daemon was already running
4107         #   2 if daemon could not be started
4108         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
4109                 || return 1
4110         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
4111                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
4112                 || return 2
4113         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
4114         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
4115         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
4116 }
4117
4118 #
4119 # Function that stops the daemon/service
4120 #
4121 do_stop()
4122 {
4123         # Return
4124         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
4125         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
4126         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
4127         #   other if a failure occurred
4128         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
4129         RETVAL="$?"
4130         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
4131         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
4132         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
4133         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
4134         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
4135         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
4136         # sleep for some time.
4137         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
4138         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
4139         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
4140         rm -f $PIDFILE
4141         return "$RETVAL"
4142 }
4143
4144 #
4145 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
4146 #
4147 do_reload() {
4148         #
4149         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
4150         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
4151         # then implement that here.
4152         #
4153         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
4154         return 0
4155 }
4156
4157 SCRIPTNAME=$1
4158 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
4159 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
4160 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
4161     script="$1"
4162     shift
4163     . $script
4164 else
4165     exit 0
4166 fi
4167
4168 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
4169 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
4170
4171 # Exit if the package is not installed
4172 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
4173
4174 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
4175 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
4176
4177 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
4178 . /lib/init/vars.sh
4179
4180 case "$1" in
4181   start)
4182         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
4183         do_start
4184         case "$?" in
4185                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
4186                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
4187         esac
4188         ;;
4189   stop)
4190         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
4191         do_stop
4192         case "$?" in
4193                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
4194                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
4195         esac
4196         ;;
4197   status)
4198         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
4199         ;;
4200   #reload|force-reload)
4201         #
4202         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
4203         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
4204         #
4205         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
4206         #do_reload
4207         #log_end_msg $?
4208         #;;
4209   restart|force-reload)
4210         #
4211         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
4212         # 'force-reload' alias
4213         #
4214         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
4215         do_stop
4216         case "$?" in
4217           0|1)
4218                 do_start
4219                 case "$?" in
4220                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
4221                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
4222                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
4223                 esac
4224                 ;;
4225           *)
4226                 # Failed to stop
4227                 log_end_msg 1
4228                 ;;
4229         esac
4230         ;;
4231   *)
4232         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
4233         exit 3
4234         ;;
4235 esac
4236
4237 :
4238 </pre></p>
4239
4240 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
4241 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
4242 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
4243 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
4244
4245 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
4246 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
4247 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
4248 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
4249 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
4250
4251       </div>
4252       <div class="tags">
4253
4254
4255         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4256
4257
4258       </div>
4259     </div>
4260     <div class="padding"></div>
4261
4262     <div class="entry">
4263       <div class="title">
4264         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Browser_plugin_for_SPICE__spice_xpi__uploaded_to_Debian.html">Browser plugin for SPICE (spice-xpi) uploaded to Debian</a>
4265       </div>
4266       <div class="date">
4267          1st November 2013
4268       </div>
4269       <div class="body">
4270         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
4271 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
4272 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
4273 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
4274 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
4275 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
4276 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
4277 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
4278 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
4279 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
4280 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
4281 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
4282
4283 <p>The source is now available from
4284 <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>
4285
4286       </div>
4287       <div class="tags">
4288
4289
4290         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4291
4292
4293       </div>
4294     </div>
4295     <div class="padding"></div>
4296
4297     <div class="entry">
4298       <div class="title">
4299         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Teaching_vmdebootstrap_to_create_Raspberry_Pi_SD_card_images.html">Teaching vmdebootstrap to create Raspberry Pi SD card images</a>
4300       </div>
4301       <div class="date">
4302         27th October 2013
4303       </div>
4304       <div class="body">
4305         <p>The
4306 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
4307 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
4308 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
4309 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
4310 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
4311 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
4312 of a plan to simplify the build system for
4313 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
4314 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
4315 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
4316 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
4317 Raspberry Pi.</p>
4318
4319 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
4320 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
4321 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
4322 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
4323 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
4324 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
4325 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
4326 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
4327 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
4328 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
4329 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
4330 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
4331 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
4332 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
4333 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
4334 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
4335 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
4336 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
4337 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
4338 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
4339 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
4340 available from
4341 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
4342 upstream project page</a>.</p>
4343
4344 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
4345 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
4346 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
4347 list:</p>
4348
4349 <p><pre>
4350 #!/bin/sh
4351 set -e # Exit on first error
4352 rootdir="$1"
4353 cd "$rootdir"
4354 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
4355 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
4356 EOF
4357 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
4358 # install a kernel somewhere too.
4359 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
4360     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
4361 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
4362 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
4363 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
4364 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
4365 </pre></p>
4366
4367 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
4368 to build the image:</p>
4369
4370 <pre>
4371 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
4372     --variant minbase \
4373     --arch armel \
4374     --distribution jessie \
4375     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
4376     --image test.img \
4377     --size 600M \
4378     --bootsize 64M \
4379     --boottype vfat \
4380     --log-level debug \
4381     --verbose \
4382     --no-kernel \
4383     --no-extlinux \
4384     --root-password raspberry \
4385     --hostname raspberrypi \
4386     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
4387     --customize `pwd`/customize \
4388     --package netbase \
4389     --package git-core \
4390     --package binutils \
4391     --package ca-certificates \
4392     --package wget \
4393     --package kmod
4394 </pre></p>
4395
4396 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
4397 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
4398 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
4399 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
4400 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
4401 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
4402 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
4403
4404 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
4405 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
4406 build dependency list.</p>
4407
4408 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
4409 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
4410 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
4411 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
4412
4413       </div>
4414       <div class="tags">
4415
4416
4417         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>.
4418
4419
4420       </div>
4421     </div>
4422     <div class="padding"></div>
4423
4424     <div class="entry">
4425       <div class="title">
4426         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_causes__Debian_Outreach_Program_for_Women__EFF_documenting_the_spying_and_Open_access_in_Norway.html">Good causes: Debian Outreach Program for Women, EFF documenting the spying and Open access in Norway</a>
4427       </div>
4428       <div class="date">
4429         15th October 2013
4430       </div>
4431       <div class="body">
4432         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
4433 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
4434 these. :)</p>
4435
4436 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
4437 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
4438 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
4439 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
4440 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
4441 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
4442 hope you will to. :)</p>
4443
4444 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
4445 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
4446 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
4447 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
4448 donated.  Are you next?</p>
4449
4450 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
4451 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
4452 statement under the heading
4453 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
4454 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
4455 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
4456 too.</p>
4457
4458       </div>
4459       <div class="tags">
4460
4461
4462         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
4463
4464
4465       </div>
4466     </div>
4467     <div class="padding"></div>
4468
4469     <div class="entry">
4470       <div class="title">
4471         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Videos_about_the_Freedombox_project___for_inspiration_and_learning.html">Videos about the Freedombox project - for inspiration and learning</a>
4472       </div>
4473       <div class="date">
4474         27th September 2013
4475       </div>
4476       <div class="body">
4477         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
4478 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
4479 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
4480 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
4481
4482 <ul>
4483
4484 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
4485 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
4486
4487 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
4488 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
4489
4490 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
4491 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
4492 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
4493 (Youtube)</li>
4494
4495 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
4496 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
4497
4498 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
4499 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
4500
4501 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
4502 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
4503 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
4504
4505 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
4506 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
4507 (Youtube)</li>
4508
4509 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
4510 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
4511
4512 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
4513 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
4514
4515 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
4516 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
4517 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
4518
4519 </ul>
4520
4521 <p>A larger list is available from
4522 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
4523 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
4524
4525 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
4526 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
4527 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
4528 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
4529 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
4530 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
4531 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
4532 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
4533 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
4534 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
4535 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
4536
4537       </div>
4538       <div class="tags">
4539
4540
4541         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
4542
4543
4544       </div>
4545     </div>
4546     <div class="padding"></div>
4547
4548     <div class="entry">
4549       <div class="title">
4550         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recipe_to_test_the_Freedombox_project_on_amd64_or_Raspberry_Pi.html">Recipe to test the Freedombox project on amd64 or Raspberry Pi</a>
4551       </div>
4552       <div class="date">
4553         10th September 2013
4554       </div>
4555       <div class="body">
4556         <p>I was introduced to the
4557 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
4558 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
4559 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
4560 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
4561 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
4562 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
4563 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
4564 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
4565
4566 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
4567 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
4568 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
4569 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
4570 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
4571
4572 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
4573 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
4574 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
4575 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
4576 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
4577 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
4578 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
4579 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
4580 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
4581 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
4582 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
4583 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
4584 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
4585 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
4586 missing in Debian).</p>
4587
4588 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
4589 scripts
4590 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
4591 and a administrative web interface
4592 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
4593 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
4594 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
4595 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
4596 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
4597 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
4598 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
4599 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
4600 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
4601 this is really working yet, see
4602 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
4603 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
4604 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
4605 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
4606 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
4607 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
4608 with lots of half baked features.</p>
4609
4610 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
4611 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
4612 at.</p>
4613
4614 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
4615
4616 <ol>
4617
4618 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
4619 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
4620 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
4621 to the Debian installer:<p>
4622 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
4623
4624 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
4625 install on.</li>
4626
4627 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
4628 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
4629
4630 </ol>
4631
4632 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
4633
4634 <ol>
4635
4636 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
4637 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
4638 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
4639 <pre>
4640 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
4641 </pre></li>
4642 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
4643 <pre>
4644 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
4645    apt-key add -
4646 apt-get update
4647 apt-get install freedombox-setup
4648 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
4649 </pre></li>
4650 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
4651
4652 </ol>
4653
4654 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
4655 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
4656 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
4657 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
4658 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
4659
4660 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
4661 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
4662 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
4663 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
4664
4665 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
4666 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
4667 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
4668 irc.debian.org and the
4669 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
4670 mailing list</a>.</p>
4671
4672 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
4673 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
4674 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
4675 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
4676 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
4677 default password is 'secret'.</p>
4678
4679       </div>
4680       <div class="tags">
4681
4682
4683         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
4684
4685
4686       </div>
4687     </div>
4688     <div class="padding"></div>
4689
4690     <div class="entry">
4691       <div class="title">
4692         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_180_SSD_disk_with_Lenovo_firmware_can_not_use_Intel_firmware.html">Intel 180 SSD disk with Lenovo firmware can not use Intel firmware</a>
4693       </div>
4694       <div class="date">
4695         18th August 2013
4696       </div>
4697       <div class="body">
4698         <p>Earlier, I reported about
4699 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
4700 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
4701 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
4702 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
4703 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
4704 currently on the disk.</p>
4705
4706 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
4707 <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>
4708 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
4709 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
4710 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
4711 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
4712 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
4713 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
4714 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
4715 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
4716 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
4717 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
4718 the broken disks.</p>
4719
4720       </div>
4721       <div class="tags">
4722
4723
4724         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4725
4726
4727       </div>
4728     </div>
4729     <div class="padding"></div>
4730
4731     <div class="entry">
4732       <div class="title">
4733         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">How to fix a Thinkpad X230 with a broken 180 GB SSD disk</a>
4734       </div>
4735       <div class="date">
4736         17th July 2013
4737       </div>
4738       <div class="body">
4739         <p>Today I switched to
4740 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
4741 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
4742 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
4743 <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
4744 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
4745 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
4746 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
4747 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
4748 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
4749 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
4750 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
4751 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
4752 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
4753 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
4754 station from now on.</p>
4755
4756 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
4757 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
4758 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
4759 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
4760 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
4761 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
4762 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
4763 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
4764 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
4765 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
4766 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
4767 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
4768
4769 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
4770 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
4771 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
4772 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
4773 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
4774 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
4775 parameters are tuned:</p>
4776
4777 <ul>
4778
4779 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
4780     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
4781
4782 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
4783     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
4784     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
4785
4786 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
4787     systems.</li>
4788
4789 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
4790     /etc/fstab.</li>
4791
4792 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
4793
4794 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
4795     cron.daily).</li>
4796
4797 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
4798     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
4799
4800 </ul>
4801
4802 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
4803 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
4804 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
4805 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
4806 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
4807 from getting the data on the disk (see
4808 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
4809 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
4810 right thing to do.</p>
4811
4812 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
4813 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
4814 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
4815
4816 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
4817 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
4818 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
4819 instead of during my work.</p>
4820
4821 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
4822 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
4823
4824 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
4825 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
4826 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
4827
4828 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
4829 there.</p>
4830
4831 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
4832 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
4833 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
4834 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
4835 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
4836 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
4837 back.</p>
4838
4839       </div>
4840       <div class="tags">
4841
4842
4843         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4844
4845
4846       </div>
4847     </div>
4848     <div class="padding"></div>
4849
4850     <div class="entry">
4851       <div class="title">
4852         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html">Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB with Lenovo firmware still lock up from sustained writes</a>
4853       </div>
4854       <div class="date">
4855         10th July 2013
4856       </div>
4857       <div class="body">
4858         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
4859 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
4860 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
4861 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
4862 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
4863 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
4864 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
4865 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
4866
4867 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
4868 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
4869 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
4870 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
4871 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
4872 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
4873 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
4874 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
4875 lock up when I download a new
4876 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
4877 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
4878 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
4879
4880 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
4881 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
4882 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
4883 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
4884 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
4885 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
4886
4887 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
4888 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
4889 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
4890 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
4891 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
4892 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
4893
4894 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
4895 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
4896 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
4897 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
4898 exist).</p>
4899
4900       </div>
4901       <div class="tags">
4902
4903
4904         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4905
4906
4907       </div>
4908     </div>
4909     <div class="padding"></div>
4910
4911     <div class="entry">
4912       <div class="title">
4913         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/July_13th__Debian_Ubuntu_BSP_and_Skolelinux_Debian_Edu_developer_gathering_in_Oslo.html">July 13th: Debian/Ubuntu BSP and Skolelinux/Debian Edu developer gathering in Oslo</a>
4914       </div>
4915       <div class="date">
4916          9th July 2013
4917       </div>
4918       <div class="body">
4919         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
4920 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
4921 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
4922 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
4923 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
4924 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
4925 Bitraf</a>.</p>
4926
4927 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
4928 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
4929 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
4930 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
4931 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
4932
4933       </div>
4934       <div class="tags">
4935
4936
4937         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
4938
4939
4940       </div>
4941     </div>
4942     <div class="padding"></div>
4943
4944     <div class="entry">
4945       <div class="title">
4946         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230?</a>
4947       </div>
4948       <div class="date">
4949          5th July 2013
4950       </div>
4951       <div class="body">
4952         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
4953 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
4954 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
4955 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
4956 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
4957 ended up picking a
4958 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
4959 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
4960 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
4961 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
4962 on that below.</p>
4963
4964 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
4965 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
4966 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
4967 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
4968 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
4969 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
4970 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
4971 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
4972 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
4973
4974 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
4975 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
4976 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
4977 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
4978 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
4979 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
4980 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
4981
4982 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
4983 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
4984
4985 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
4986 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
4987 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
4988 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
4989 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
4990 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
4991 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
4992 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
4993 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
4994 kernel developers as
4995 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
4996 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
4997 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
4998 Lenovo forums, both for
4999 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
5000 2012-11-10</a> and for
5001 <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
5002 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
5003 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
5004 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
5005 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
5006 There is even a
5007 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
5008 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
5009 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
5010
5011 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
5012 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
5013 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
5014 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
5015 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
5016 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
5017 fixed. :)</p>
5018
5019       </div>
5020       <div class="tags">
5021
5022
5023         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5024
5025
5026       </div>
5027     </div>
5028     <div class="padding"></div>
5029
5030     <div class="entry">
5031       <div class="title">
5032         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230</a>
5033       </div>
5034       <div class="date">
5035          4th July 2013
5036       </div>
5037       <div class="body">
5038         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
5039 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
5040 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
5041 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
5042 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
5043 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
5044 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
5045 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
5046 with an expencive door stop.</p>
5047
5048 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
5049 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
5050 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
5051 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
5052 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
5053 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
5054 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
5055
5056 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
5057 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
5058 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
5059 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
5060 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
5061 new laptop now. :)</p>
5062
5063 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
5064
5065       </div>
5066       <div class="tags">
5067
5068
5069         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5070
5071
5072       </div>
5073     </div>
5074     <div class="padding"></div>
5075
5076     <div class="entry">
5077       <div class="title">
5078         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html">Automatically locate and install required firmware packages on Debian (Isenkram 0.4)</a>
5079       </div>
5080       <div class="date">
5081         25th June 2013
5082       </div>
5083       <div class="body">
5084         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
5085 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
5086 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
5087 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
5088 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
5089 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
5090 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
5091 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
5092 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
5093 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
5094 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
5095
5096 <p><pre>
5097 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
5098 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
5099 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
5100 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
5101 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
5102 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
5103 firmware-ipw2x00
5104 firmware-ipw2x00
5105 Preconfiguring packages ...
5106 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
5107 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
5108 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
5109 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
5110 #
5111 </pre></p>
5112
5113 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
5114 printed instead:</p>
5115
5116 <p><pre>
5117 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
5118 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
5119 #
5120 </pre></p>
5121
5122 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
5123 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
5124
5125 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
5126 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
5127 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
5128 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
5129 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
5130 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
5131 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
5132 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
5133 machine.</p>
5134
5135 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
5136 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
5137 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
5138 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
5139 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
5140 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
5141
5142       </div>
5143       <div class="tags">
5144
5145
5146         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
5147
5148
5149       </div>
5150     </div>
5151     <div class="padding"></div>
5152
5153     <div class="entry">
5154       <div class="title">
5155         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_the_Linux_black_screen_of_death_on_machines_with_Intel_HD_video.html">Fixing the Linux black screen of death on machines with Intel HD video</a>
5156       </div>
5157       <div class="date">
5158         11th June 2013
5159       </div>
5160       <div class="body">
5161         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
5162 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
5163 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
5164 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
5165 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
5166 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
5167 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
5168 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
5169 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
5170 i915 driver used by the
5171 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
5172 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
5173
5174 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
5175 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
5176 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
5177 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
5178 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
5179
5180 <pre>
5181 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
5182 update-initramfs -u -k all
5183 </pre>
5184
5185 <p>Since March 2012 there is
5186 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
5187 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
5188 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
5189 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
5190 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
5191 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
5192 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
5193 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
5194 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
5195 number.</p>
5196
5197 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
5198 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
5199
5200 <p><pre>
5201 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
5202     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
5203     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
5204  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
5205  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
5206     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
5207  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
5208     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
5209  Latency: 0
5210  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
5211  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
5212  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
5213  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
5214  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
5215  Capabilities: <access denied>
5216  Kernel driver in use: i915
5217 </pre></p>
5218
5219 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
5220
5221 <p><pre>
5222 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
5223        ...
5224         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
5225         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
5226        ...
5227 }
5228 </pre></p>
5229
5230 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
5231 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
5232 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
5233 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
5234 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
5235 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
5236 yet shown up in
5237 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
5238 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
5239 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
5240 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
5241 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
5242 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
5243
5244 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
5245 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
5246 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
5247 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
5248 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
5249 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
5250 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
5251 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
5252 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
5253 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
5254 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
5255 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
5256
5257 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
5258 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
5259 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
5260 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
5261 backlight.</p>
5262
5263       </div>
5264       <div class="tags">
5265
5266
5267         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5268
5269
5270       </div>
5271     </div>
5272     <div class="padding"></div>
5273
5274     <div class="entry">
5275       <div class="title">
5276         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8.html">How to install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8</a>
5277       </div>
5278       <div class="date">
5279         27th May 2013
5280       </div>
5281       <div class="body">
5282         <p>Two days ago, I asked
5283 <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
5284 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
5285 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
5286 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
5287 and Windows 8.</p>
5288
5289 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
5290 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
5291 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
5292 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
5293 enough to tell.</p>
5294
5295 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
5296 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
5297 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
5298 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
5299 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
5300 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
5301 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
5302 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
5303 to follow.</p>
5304
5305 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
5306 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
5307 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
5308 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
5309 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
5310 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
5311 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
5312 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
5313
5314 <p>I've updated the
5315 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
5316 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
5317 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
5318 machine.</p>
5319
5320 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
5321 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
5322
5323       </div>
5324       <div class="tags">
5325
5326
5327         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5328
5329
5330       </div>
5331     </div>
5332     <div class="padding"></div>
5333
5334     <div class="entry">
5335       <div class="title">
5336         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">How can I install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8?</a>
5337       </div>
5338       <div class="date">
5339         25th May 2013
5340       </div>
5341       <div class="body">
5342         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
5343 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
5344 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
5345 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
5346 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
5347 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
5348
5349 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
5350 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
5351 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
5352 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
5353 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
5354 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
5355 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
5356 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
5357 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
5358 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
5359
5360 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
5361 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
5362 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
5363 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
5364 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
5365 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
5366
5367 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
5368 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
5369 on new Laptops?</p>
5370
5371       </div>
5372       <div class="tags">
5373
5374
5375         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5376
5377
5378       </div>
5379     </div>
5380     <div class="padding"></div>
5381
5382     <div class="entry">
5383       <div class="title">
5384         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_transform_a_Debian_based_system_to_a_Debian_Edu_installation.html">How to transform a Debian based system to a Debian Edu installation</a>
5385       </div>
5386       <div class="date">
5387         17th May 2013
5388       </div>
5389       <div class="body">
5390         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
5391 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
5392 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
5393 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
5394 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
5395 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
5396 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
5397 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
5398 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
5399 donate some money</a>.
5400
5401 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
5402 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
5403 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
5404 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
5405 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
5406
5407 <p>The script,
5408 <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/>
5409 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
5410 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
5411 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
5412
5413 <ol>
5414
5415 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
5416 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
5417 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
5418     our configuration.</li>
5419 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
5420     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
5421     according to the profile specified in the config above,
5422     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
5423 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
5424     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
5425 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
5426
5427 </ol>
5428
5429 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
5430 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
5431 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
5432 the needed packages.</p>
5433
5434 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
5435 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
5436 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
5437 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
5438 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
5439 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
5440
5441 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
5442 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
5443 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
5444
5445 <p><pre>
5446 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
5447 DESKTOP="lxde"
5448 </pre></p>
5449
5450 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
5451 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
5452 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
5453 boot.</p>
5454
5455       </div>
5456       <div class="tags">
5457
5458
5459         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5460
5461
5462       </div>
5463     </div>
5464     <div class="padding"></div>
5465
5466     <div class="entry">
5467       <div class="title">
5468         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian__the_Linux_distribution_of_choice_for_LEGO_designers_.html">Debian, the Linux distribution of choice for LEGO designers?</a>
5469       </div>
5470       <div class="date">
5471         11th May 2013
5472       </div>
5473       <div class="body">
5474         <P>In January,
5475 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
5476 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
5477 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
5478 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
5479 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
5480 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
5481 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
5482 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
5483 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
5484 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
5485 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
5486 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
5487
5488 <p><table>
5489 <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>
5490 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
5491 <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>
5492 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
5493 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
5494 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
5495 <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>
5496 <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>
5497 <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>
5498 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
5499 </table></p>
5500
5501 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
5502 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
5503 available in experimental.</p>
5504
5505 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
5506 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
5507 for LEGO designers.</p>
5508
5509       </div>
5510       <div class="tags">
5511
5512
5513         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
5514
5515
5516       </div>
5517     </div>
5518     <div class="padding"></div>
5519
5520     <div class="entry">
5521       <div class="title">
5522         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Wheezy_is_out___and_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_should_soon_follow___newinwheezy.html">Debian Wheezy is out - and Debian Edu / Skolelinux should soon follow! #newinwheezy</a>
5523       </div>
5524       <div class="date">
5525          5th May 2013
5526       </div>
5527       <div class="body">
5528         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
5529 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
5530 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
5531 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
5532 soon.</p>
5533
5534 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
5535 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
5536 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
5537 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
5538 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
5539 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
5540 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
5541 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
5542 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
5543 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
5544 Edu.</a>
5545
5546 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
5547 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
5548 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
5549 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
5550 follow.<p>
5551
5552       </div>
5553       <div class="tags">
5554
5555
5556         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5557
5558
5559       </div>
5560     </div>
5561     <div class="padding"></div>
5562
5563     <div class="entry">
5564       <div class="title">
5565         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html">Isenkram 0.2 finally in the Debian archive</a>
5566       </div>
5567       <div class="date">
5568          3rd April 2013
5569       </div>
5570       <div class="body">
5571         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
5572 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
5573 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
5574 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
5575
5576 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
5577 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
5578 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
5579 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
5580 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
5581 BTS. :)</p>
5582
5583       </div>
5584       <div class="tags">
5585
5586
5587         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
5588
5589
5590       </div>
5591     </div>
5592     <div class="padding"></div>
5593
5594     <div class="entry">
5595       <div class="title">
5596         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html">Bitcoin GUI now available from Debian/unstable (and Ubuntu/raring)</a>
5597       </div>
5598       <div class="date">
5599          2nd February 2013
5600       </div>
5601       <div class="body">
5602         <p>My
5603 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
5604 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
5605 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
5606 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
5607 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
5608 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
5609 version too.</p>
5610
5611 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
5612 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
5613 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
5614 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
5615 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
5616 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
5617 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
5618 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
5619
5620 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
5621 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
5622 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
5623 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
5624 it. :)</p>
5625
5626 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5627 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5628 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5629
5630       </div>
5631       <div class="tags">
5632
5633
5634         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5635
5636
5637       </div>
5638     </div>
5639     <div class="padding"></div>
5640
5641     <div class="entry">
5642       <div class="title">
5643         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
5644       </div>
5645       <div class="date">
5646         22nd January 2013
5647       </div>
5648       <div class="body">
5649         <p>Yesterday, I
5650 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
5651 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
5652 pluggable hardware devices, which I
5653 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
5654 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
5655 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
5656 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
5657 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
5658 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
5659 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
5660 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
5661 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
5662 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
5663
5664 <pre>
5665 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
5666 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
5667 </pre>
5668
5669 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
5670 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
5671 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
5672 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
5673
5674 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
5675 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
5676 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
5677 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
5678 word.</p>
5679
5680 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
5681 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
5682 process.</p>
5683
5684 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
5685 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
5686
5687       </div>
5688       <div class="tags">
5689
5690
5691         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
5692
5693
5694       </div>
5695     </div>
5696     <div class="padding"></div>
5697
5698     <div class="entry">
5699       <div class="title">
5700         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">First prototype ready making hardware easier to use in Debian</a>
5701       </div>
5702       <div class="date">
5703         21st January 2013
5704       </div>
5705       <div class="body">
5706         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
5707 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
5708 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
5709 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
5710 it, fetch the
5711 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
5712 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
5713 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
5714 autostart script.</p>
5715
5716 <p>The design is simple:</p>
5717
5718 <ul>
5719
5720 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
5721 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
5722
5723 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
5724 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
5725 initially did.</li>
5726
5727 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
5728 the APT database, a database
5729 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
5730 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
5731
5732 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
5733 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
5734 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
5735 package or packages.</li>
5736
5737 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
5738 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
5739
5740 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
5741 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
5742
5743 </ul>
5744
5745 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
5746 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
5747 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
5748 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
5749
5750 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
5751 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
5752 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
5753 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
5754 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
5755
5756 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
5757 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
5758 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
5759 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
5760 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
5761 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
5762 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
5763 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
5764
5765 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
5766 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
5767 '<tt>svn checkout
5768 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
5769 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
5770 devscripts package.</p>
5771
5772 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
5773 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
5774 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
5775 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
5776 instructions</a> for details.</p>
5777
5778       </div>
5779       <div class="tags">
5780
5781
5782         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
5783
5784
5785       </div>
5786     </div>
5787     <div class="padding"></div>
5788
5789     <div class="entry">
5790       <div class="title">
5791         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">Thank you Thinkpad X41, for your long and trustworthy service</a>
5792       </div>
5793       <div class="date">
5794         19th January 2013
5795       </div>
5796       <div class="body">
5797         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
5798 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
5799 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
5800 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
5801 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
5802 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
5803 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
5804 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
5805 not a durable solution.
5806
5807 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
5808 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
5809
5810 <ul>
5811
5812 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
5813   than A4).</li>
5814 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
5815 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
5816 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
5817 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
5818 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
5819 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
5820 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
5821 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
5822 size).</li>
5823 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
5824   X.org packages.</li>
5825 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
5826   the time).
5827
5828 </ul>
5829
5830 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
5831 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
5832 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
5833 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
5834 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
5835 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
5836 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
5837 still be useful.</p>
5838
5839 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
5840 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
5841 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
5842 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
5843 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
5844 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
5845
5846       </div>
5847       <div class="tags">
5848
5849
5850         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5851
5852
5853       </div>
5854     </div>
5855     <div class="padding"></div>
5856
5857     <div class="entry">
5858       <div class="title">
5859         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html">How to find a browser plugin supporting a given MIME type</a>
5860       </div>
5861       <div class="date">
5862         18th January 2013
5863       </div>
5864       <div class="body">
5865         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
5866 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
5867 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
5868 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
5869 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
5870 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
5871 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
5872
5873 <pre>
5874 #!/usr/bin/python
5875 import sys
5876 import apt
5877 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
5878     cache = apt.Cache()
5879     cache.open(None)
5880     thepkgs = []
5881     for pkg in cache:
5882         version = pkg.candidate
5883         if version is None:
5884             version = pkg.installed
5885         if version is None:
5886             continue
5887         record = version.record
5888         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
5889             continue
5890         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
5891         for t in mime_types:
5892             t = t.rstrip().strip()
5893             if t == mimetype:
5894                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
5895     return thepkgs
5896 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
5897 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
5898     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
5899 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
5900 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
5901     print "  %s" %pkg
5902 </pre>
5903
5904 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
5905
5906 <pre>
5907 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
5908 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
5909   gecko-mediaplayer
5910 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
5911 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
5912   browser-plugin-gnash
5913 %
5914 </pre>
5915
5916 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
5917 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
5918 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
5919 anyone working on adding it?</p>
5920
5921 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
5922 request for icweasel support for this feature is
5923 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
5924 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
5925 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
5926 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
5927
5928       </div>
5929       <div class="tags">
5930
5931
5932         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5933
5934
5935       </div>
5936     </div>
5937     <div class="padding"></div>
5938
5939     <div class="entry">
5940       <div class="title">
5941         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian?</a>
5942       </div>
5943       <div class="date">
5944         16th January 2013
5945       </div>
5946       <div class="body">
5947         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
5948 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
5949 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
5950 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
5951 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
5952 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
5953 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
5954 downloaded by the browser.</p>
5955
5956 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
5957 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
5958 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
5959 can be found on the
5960 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
5961 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
5962 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
5963 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
5964 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
5965
5966 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
5967
5968 <pre>
5969   count MIME type
5970   ----- -----------------------
5971      32 text/plain
5972      30 audio/mpeg
5973      29 image/png
5974      28 image/jpeg
5975      27 application/ogg
5976      26 audio/x-mp3
5977      25 image/tiff
5978      25 image/gif
5979      22 image/bmp
5980      22 audio/x-wav
5981      20 audio/x-flac
5982      19 audio/x-mpegurl
5983      18 video/x-ms-asf
5984      18 audio/x-musepack
5985      18 audio/x-mpeg
5986      18 application/x-ogg
5987      17 video/mpeg
5988      17 audio/x-scpls
5989      17 audio/ogg
5990      16 video/x-ms-wmv
5991 </pre>
5992
5993 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
5994
5995 <pre>
5996   count MIME type
5997   ----- -----------------------
5998      33 text/plain
5999      32 image/png
6000      32 image/jpeg
6001      29 audio/mpeg
6002      27 image/gif
6003      26 image/tiff
6004      26 application/ogg
6005      25 audio/x-mp3
6006      22 image/bmp
6007      21 audio/x-wav
6008      19 audio/x-mpegurl
6009      19 audio/x-mpeg
6010      18 video/mpeg
6011      18 audio/x-scpls
6012      18 audio/x-flac
6013      18 application/x-ogg
6014      17 video/x-ms-asf
6015      17 text/html
6016      17 audio/x-musepack
6017      16 image/x-xbitmap
6018 </pre>
6019
6020 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
6021
6022 <pre>
6023   count MIME type
6024   ----- -----------------------
6025      31 text/plain
6026      31 image/png
6027      31 image/jpeg
6028      29 audio/mpeg
6029      28 application/ogg
6030      27 image/gif
6031      26 image/tiff
6032      26 audio/x-mp3
6033      23 audio/x-wav
6034      22 image/bmp
6035      21 audio/x-flac
6036      20 audio/x-mpegurl
6037      19 audio/x-mpeg
6038      18 video/x-ms-asf
6039      18 video/mpeg
6040      18 audio/x-scpls
6041      18 application/x-ogg
6042      17 audio/x-musepack
6043      16 video/x-ms-wmv
6044      16 video/x-msvideo
6045 </pre>
6046
6047 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
6048 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
6049 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
6050 issues.</p>
6051
6052 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
6053 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
6054
6055       </div>
6056       <div class="tags">
6057
6058
6059         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6060
6061
6062       </div>
6063     </div>
6064     <div class="padding"></div>
6065
6066     <div class="entry">
6067       <div class="title">
6068         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html">Using modalias info to find packages handling my hardware</a>
6069       </div>
6070       <div class="date">
6071         15th January 2013
6072       </div>
6073       <div class="body">
6074         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
6075 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
6076 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
6077 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
6078 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
6079 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
6080 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
6081 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
6082 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
6083 packages.</p>
6084
6085 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
6086 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
6087 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
6088 modalias.</p>
6089
6090 <p><blockquote>
6091 Package: package-name
6092 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
6093 </blockquote></p>
6094
6095 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
6096 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
6097
6098 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
6099 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
6100
6101 <p><blockquote>
6102 Package: cheese
6103 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
6104 </blockquote></p>
6105
6106 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
6107 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
6108
6109 <p><blockquote>
6110 Package: pcmciautils
6111 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
6112 </blockquote></p>
6113
6114 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
6115 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
6116
6117 <p><blockquote>
6118 Package: colorhug-client
6119 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
6120 </blockquote></p>
6121
6122 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
6123 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
6124 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
6125
6126 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
6127 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
6128 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
6129 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
6130 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
6131 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
6132 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
6133 Raring.</p>
6134
6135 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
6136 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
6137 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
6138 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
6139 try the
6140 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
6141 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
6142 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
6143 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
6144
6145 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
6146 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
6147
6148 <p><blockquote>
6149 % ./hw-support-lookup
6150 <br>yubikey-personalization
6151 <br>%
6152 </blockquote></p>
6153
6154 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
6155 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
6156
6157 <p><blockquote>
6158 % ./hw-support-lookup
6159 <br>pcmciautils
6160 <br>%
6161 </blockquote></p>
6162
6163 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
6164 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
6165 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
6166
6167 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
6168 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
6169 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
6170 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
6171 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
6172 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
6173 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
6174 see if it work.</p>
6175
6176 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
6177 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
6178 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
6179 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
6180
6181       </div>
6182       <div class="tags">
6183
6184
6185         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
6186
6187
6188       </div>
6189     </div>
6190     <div class="padding"></div>
6191
6192     <div class="entry">
6193       <div class="title">
6194         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">Modalias strings - a practical way to map "stuff" to hardware</a>
6195       </div>
6196       <div class="date">
6197         14th January 2013
6198       </div>
6199       <div class="body">
6200         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
6201 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
6202 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
6203 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
6204 in
6205 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
6206 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
6207
6208 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
6209
6210 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
6211 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
6212 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
6213 &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;,
6214 &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
6215 &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;.
6216
6217 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
6218 this shell script:</p>
6219
6220 <pre>
6221 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
6222 </pre>
6223
6224 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
6225 using modinfo:</p>
6226
6227 <pre>
6228 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
6229 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
6230 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
6231 %
6232 </pre>
6233
6234 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
6235
6236 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
6237 Bridge memory controller:</p>
6238
6239 <p><blockquote>
6240 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
6241 </blockquote></p>
6242
6243 <p>This represent these values:</p>
6244
6245 <pre>
6246  v   00008086  (vendor)
6247  d   00002770  (device)
6248  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
6249  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
6250  bc  06        (bus class)
6251  sc  00        (bus subclass)
6252  i   00        (interface)
6253 </pre>
6254
6255 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
6256 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
6257 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
6258 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
6259
6260 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
6261 means.</p>
6262
6263 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
6264
6265 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
6266 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
6267
6268 <p><blockquote>
6269 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
6270 </blockquote></p>
6271
6272 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
6273
6274 <pre>
6275  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
6276  p    0001  (device product)
6277  d    0206  (bcddevice)
6278  dc     09  (device class)
6279  dsc    00  (device subclass)
6280  dp     00  (device protocol)
6281  ic     09  (interface class)
6282  isc    00  (interface subclass)
6283  ip     00  (interface protocol)
6284 </pre>
6285
6286 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
6287 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
6288 these alias entries show up:</p>
6289
6290 <p><blockquote>
6291 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
6292 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
6293 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
6294 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
6295 </blockquote></p>
6296
6297 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
6298 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
6299 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
6300
6301 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
6302
6303 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
6304 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
6305
6306 <p><blockquote>
6307 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
6308 </blockquote></p>
6309
6310 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
6311
6312 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
6313
6314 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
6315 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
6316 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
6317
6318 <p><blockquote>
6319 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
6320 </blockquote></p>
6321
6322 <p>The values present are</p>
6323
6324 <pre>
6325  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
6326  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
6327  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
6328  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
6329  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
6330  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
6331  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
6332  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
6333  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
6334  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
6335  ct   10             (chassis type)
6336  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
6337 </pre>
6338
6339 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
6340 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
6341
6342 <pre>
6343   3 Desktop
6344   4 Low Profile Desktop
6345   5 Pizza Box
6346   6 Mini Tower
6347   7 Tower
6348   8 Portable
6349   9 Laptop
6350  10 Notebook
6351  11 Hand Held
6352  12 Docking Station
6353  13 All In One
6354  14 Sub Notebook
6355  15 Space-saving
6356  16 Lunch Box
6357  17 Main Server Chassis
6358  18 Expansion Chassis
6359  19 Sub Chassis
6360  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
6361  21 Peripheral Chassis
6362  22 RAID Chassis
6363  23 Rack Mount Chassis
6364  24 Sealed-case PC
6365  25 Multi-system
6366  26 CompactPCI
6367  27 AdvancedTCA
6368  28 Blade
6369  29 Blade Enclosing
6370 </pre>
6371
6372 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
6373 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
6374 claim it is a desktop.</p>
6375
6376 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
6377
6378 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
6379 test machine:</p>
6380
6381 <p><blockquote>
6382 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
6383 </blockquote></p>
6384
6385 <p>The values present are</p>
6386
6387 <pre>
6388   ty  01  (type)
6389   pr  00  (prototype)
6390   id  00  (id)
6391   ex  00  (extra)
6392 </pre>
6393
6394 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
6395 the valid values are.</p>
6396
6397 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
6398
6399 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
6400 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
6401 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
6402 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
6403 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
6404 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
6405 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
6406
6407 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
6408
6409 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
6410 one can use the following shell script:</p>
6411
6412 <pre>
6413   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
6414     echo "$id" ; \
6415     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
6416   done
6417 </pre>
6418
6419 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
6420 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
6421
6422 <pre>
6423   acpi:ACPI0003:
6424     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
6425   acpi:device:
6426   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
6427   acpi:IBM0068:
6428     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
6429     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
6430     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
6431     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
6432   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
6433     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
6434     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
6435     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
6436   [...]
6437 </pre>
6438
6439 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
6440 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
6441 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
6442 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
6443
6444 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
6445 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
6446 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
6447
6448       </div>
6449       <div class="tags">
6450
6451
6452         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
6453
6454
6455       </div>
6456     </div>
6457     <div class="padding"></div>
6458
6459     <div class="entry">
6460       <div class="title">
6461         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html">Moved the pymissile Debian packaging to collab-maint</a>
6462       </div>
6463       <div class="date">
6464         10th January 2013
6465       </div>
6466       <div class="body">
6467         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
6468 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
6469 Launcher and updated the Debian package
6470 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
6471 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
6472 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
6473 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
6474 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
6475 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
6476 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
6477 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
6478 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
6479 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
6480 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
6481 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
6482 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
6483 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
6484 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
6485
6486       </div>
6487       <div class="tags">
6488
6489
6490         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
6491
6492
6493       </div>
6494     </div>
6495     <div class="padding"></div>
6496
6497     <div class="entry">
6498       <div class="title">
6499         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">Lets make hardware dongles easier to use in Debian</a>
6500       </div>
6501       <div class="date">
6502          9th January 2013
6503       </div>
6504       <div class="body">
6505         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
6506 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
6507 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
6508 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
6509 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
6510 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
6511 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
6512 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
6513 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
6514 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
6515 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
6516
6517 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
6518 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
6519 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
6520 simple:
6521
6522 <ul>
6523
6524 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
6525   starting when a user log in.</li>
6526
6527 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
6528   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
6529
6530 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
6531   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
6532   packages.</li>
6533
6534 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
6535   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
6536
6537 </ul>
6538
6539 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
6540 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
6541 discover database to find packages and
6542 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
6543 packages.</p>
6544
6545 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
6546 draft package is now checked into
6547 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
6548 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
6549 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
6550 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
6551 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
6552 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
6553 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
6554 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
6555 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
6556 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
6557 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
6558 because of the freeze).</p>
6559
6560 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
6561 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
6562 inserted):</p>
6563
6564 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
6565
6566 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
6567 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
6568 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
6569
6570 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
6571 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
6572 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
6573 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
6574 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
6575 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
6576 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
6577
6578 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
6579 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
6580 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
6581 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
6582 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
6583 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
6584 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
6585 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
6586 not be installed?</p>
6587
6588 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
6589 please send me an email. :)</p>
6590
6591       </div>
6592       <div class="tags">
6593
6594
6595         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
6596
6597
6598       </div>
6599     </div>
6600     <div class="padding"></div>
6601
6602     <div class="entry">
6603       <div class="title">
6604         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">New IRC channel for LEGO designers using Debian</a>
6605       </div>
6606       <div class="date">
6607          2nd January 2013
6608       </div>
6609       <div class="body">
6610         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
6611 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
6612 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
6613 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
6614 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
6615 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
6616 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
6617 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
6618 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
6619 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
6620
6621 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
6622 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
6623 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
6624
6625       </div>
6626       <div class="tags">
6627
6628
6629         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
6630
6631
6632       </div>
6633     </div>
6634     <div class="padding"></div>
6635
6636     <div class="entry">
6637       <div class="title">
6638         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">How to backport bitcoin-qt version 0.7.2-2 to Debian Squeeze</a>
6639       </div>
6640       <div class="date">
6641         25th December 2012
6642       </div>
6643       <div class="body">
6644         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
6645 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
6646
6647 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
6648 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
6649 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
6650 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
6651 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
6652 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
6653 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
6654 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
6655 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
6656 name.</p>
6657
6658 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
6659 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
6660 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
6661
6662 <blockquote><pre>
6663 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
6664 cd bitcoin
6665 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
6666 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
6667 </pre></blockquote>
6668
6669 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
6670 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
6671 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
6672 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
6673 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
6674 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
6675 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
6676 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
6677 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
6678
6679 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6680 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6681 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6682
6683       </div>
6684       <div class="tags">
6685
6686
6687         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6688
6689
6690       </div>
6691     </div>
6692     <div class="padding"></div>
6693
6694     <div class="entry">
6695       <div class="title">
6696         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
6697       </div>
6698       <div class="date">
6699         21st December 2012
6700       </div>
6701       <div class="body">
6702         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
6703 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
6704 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
6705 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
6706 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
6707 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
6708 is now maintained by a
6709 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
6710 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
6711 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
6712 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
6713 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
6714 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
6715 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
6716 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
6717 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
6718 Corallo in a
6719 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
6720 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
6721 Debian package.</p>
6722
6723 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
6724 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
6725 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
6726 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
6727 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
6728 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
6729 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
6730 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
6731 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
6732 new version to unstable.
6733
6734 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
6735 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
6736 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
6737 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
6738 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
6739 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
6740 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
6741 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
6742 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
6743 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
6744 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
6745 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
6746 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
6747 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
6748 have not tested them.</p>
6749
6750 <p>My
6751 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
6752 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
6753 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
6754 years ago, as can be
6755 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
6756 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
6757 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
6758 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
6759 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
6760 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
6761 the same address as last time,
6762 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6763
6764       </div>
6765       <div class="tags">
6766
6767
6768         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6769
6770
6771       </div>
6772     </div>
6773     <div class="padding"></div>
6774
6775     <div class="entry">
6776       <div class="title">
6777         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Git repository for song book for Computer Scientists</a>
6778       </div>
6779       <div class="date">
6780          7th September 2012
6781       </div>
6782       <div class="body">
6783         <p>As I
6784 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
6785 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
6786 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
6787 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
6788 repository for the project</a>.</p>
6789
6790 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
6791 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
6792 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
6793 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
6794
6795 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
6796 PostScript formats at
6797 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
6798 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
6799
6800       </div>
6801       <div class="tags">
6802
6803
6804         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
6805
6806
6807       </div>
6808     </div>
6809     <div class="padding"></div>
6810
6811     <div class="entry">
6812       <div class="title">
6813         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gratulerer_med_19__rsdagen__Debian_.html">Gratulerer med 19-årsdagen, Debian!</a>
6814       </div>
6815       <div class="date">
6816         16th August 2012
6817       </div>
6818       <div class="body">
6819         <p>I dag fyller
6820 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120813">Debian-prosjektet 19
6821 år</a>.  Jeg har fulgt det de siste 12 årene, og er veldig glad for å kunne
6822 si gratulerer med dagen, Debian!</p>
6823
6824       </div>
6825       <div class="tags">
6826
6827
6828         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
6829
6830
6831       </div>
6832     </div>
6833     <div class="padding"></div>
6834
6835     <div class="entry">
6836       <div class="title">
6837         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
6838       </div>
6839       <div class="date">
6840         24th June 2012
6841       </div>
6842       <div class="body">
6843         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
6844 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
6845 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
6846 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
6847 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
6848 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
6849 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
6850 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
6851 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
6852 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
6853 missing in my book.</p>
6854
6855 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
6856 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
6857 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
6858 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
6859 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
6860 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
6861 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
6862
6863       </div>
6864       <div class="tags">
6865
6866
6867         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
6868
6869
6870       </div>
6871     </div>
6872     <div class="padding"></div>
6873
6874     <div class="entry">
6875       <div class="title">
6876         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
6877       </div>
6878       <div class="date">
6879         21st November 2011
6880       </div>
6881       <div class="body">
6882         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
6883 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
6884 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
6885 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
6886 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
6887 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
6888 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
6889 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
6890 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
6891 the tools to do so.</p>
6892
6893 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
6894 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
6895 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
6896 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
6897
6898 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
6899 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
6900 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
6901 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
6902 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
6903 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
6904 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
6905 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
6906
6907 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
6908 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
6909 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
6910
6911 <p><pre>
6912 #!/usr/bin/perl
6913 use strict;
6914 use warnings;
6915 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
6916 BEGIN {
6917     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
6918     my %rhelmodules = (
6919         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
6920         );
6921     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
6922         eval "use $module;";
6923         if ($@) {
6924             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
6925             system("yum install -y $pkg");
6926             eval "use $module;";
6927         }
6928     }
6929 }
6930 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
6931
6932 upgrade_dell();
6933
6934 exit 0;
6935
6936 sub run_firmware_script {
6937     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
6938     unless ($script) {
6939         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
6940         exit 1
6941     }
6942     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
6943
6944     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
6945         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
6946     } else {
6947         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
6948     }
6949 }
6950
6951 sub run_firmware_scripts {
6952     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
6953     # Run firmware packages
6954     for my $dir (@dirs) {
6955         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
6956         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
6957         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
6958             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
6959             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
6960         }
6961         closedir $dh;
6962     }
6963 }
6964
6965 sub download {
6966     my $url = shift;
6967     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
6968     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
6969 }
6970
6971 sub upgrade_dell {
6972     my @dirs;
6973     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
6974     chomp $product;
6975
6976     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
6977
6978         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
6979         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
6980
6981         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
6982             CLEANUP => 1
6983             );
6984         chdir($tmpdir);
6985         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
6986         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
6987         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
6988         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
6989         my $fwopts = "-q";
6990         if (@paths) {
6991             for my $url (@paths) {
6992                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
6993             }
6994             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
6995         } else {
6996             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
6997             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
6998         }
6999         chdir('/');
7000     } else {
7001         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
7002         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
7003     }
7004 }
7005
7006 sub fetch_dell_fw {
7007     my $path = shift;
7008     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
7009     download($url);
7010 }
7011
7012 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
7013 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
7014 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
7015 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
7016     my $filename = shift;
7017
7018     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
7019     chomp $product;
7020     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
7021
7022     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
7023
7024     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
7025     my @paths;
7026     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
7027         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
7028         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
7029         my $oscode;
7030         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
7031             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
7032         } else {
7033             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
7034         }
7035         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
7036         {
7037             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
7038         }
7039     }
7040     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
7041         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
7042
7043         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
7044         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
7045
7046         my $cpath = $component->{path};
7047         for my $path (@paths) {
7048             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
7049                 push(@paths, $cpath);
7050             }
7051         }
7052     }
7053     return @paths;
7054 }
7055 </pre>
7056
7057 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
7058 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
7059 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
7060 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
7061 outdated.</p>
7062
7063       </div>
7064       <div class="tags">
7065
7066
7067         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7068
7069
7070       </div>
7071     </div>
7072     <div class="padding"></div>
7073
7074     <div class="entry">
7075       <div class="title">
7076         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html">How is booting into runlevel 1 different from single user boots?</a>
7077       </div>
7078       <div class="date">
7079          4th August 2011
7080       </div>
7081       <div class="body">
7082         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
7083 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
7084 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
7085 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
7086 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
7087 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
7088 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
7089 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
7090 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
7091
7092 <p><blockquote>
7093 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
7094 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
7095 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
7096 </blockquote></p>
7097
7098 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
7099 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
7100 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
7101 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
7102 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
7103 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
7104 hard to explain.</p>
7105
7106 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
7107 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
7108 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
7109 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
7110 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
7111 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
7112 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
7113 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
7114 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
7115 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
7116 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
7117 mode).</p>
7118
7119 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
7120 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
7121 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
7122 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
7123 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
7124 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
7125 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
7126 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
7127 after visiting single user mode.</p>
7128
7129 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
7130 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
7131 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
7132 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
7133 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
7134 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
7135 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
7136 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
7137
7138 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
7139 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
7140 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
7141
7142       </div>
7143       <div class="tags">
7144
7145
7146         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7147
7148
7149       </div>
7150     </div>
7151     <div class="padding"></div>
7152
7153     <div class="entry">
7154       <div class="title">
7155         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">What should start from /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian? - almost nothing</a>
7156       </div>
7157       <div class="date">
7158         30th July 2011
7159       </div>
7160       <div class="body">
7161         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
7162 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
7163 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
7164 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
7165 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
7166 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
7167 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
7168 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
7169 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
7170 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
7171 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
7172 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
7173 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
7174
7175 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
7176 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
7177 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
7178 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
7179 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
7180 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
7181 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
7182 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
7183 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
7184
7185 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
7186 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
7187 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
7188 is presented.</p>
7189
7190 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
7191 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
7192 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
7193 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
7194 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
7195 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
7196 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
7197 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
7198 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
7199 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
7200 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
7201 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
7202 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
7203 find time to push this forward.</p>
7204
7205       </div>
7206       <div class="tags">
7207
7208
7209         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7210
7211
7212       </div>
7213     </div>
7214     <div class="padding"></div>
7215
7216     <div class="entry">
7217       <div class="title">
7218         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">What is missing in the Debian desktop, or why my parents use Kubuntu</a>
7219       </div>
7220       <div class="date">
7221         29th July 2011
7222       </div>
7223       <div class="body">
7224         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
7225 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
7226 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
7227 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
7228 issues.</p>
7229
7230 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
7231 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
7232 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
7233
7234 <ol>
7235
7236 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
7237 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
7238 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
7239 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
7240 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
7241 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
7242 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
7243 Debian.</li>
7244
7245 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
7246 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
7247 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
7248 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
7249 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
7250 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
7251 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
7252 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
7253 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
7254 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
7255 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
7256 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
7257 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
7258
7259 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
7260 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
7261 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
7262 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
7263 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
7264 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
7265 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
7266 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
7267 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
7268 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
7269
7270 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
7271 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
7272 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
7273 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
7274 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
7275 latter behaviour.</li>
7276
7277 </ol>
7278
7279 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
7280 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
7281 it do not matter much.</p>
7282
7283 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
7284 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
7285 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
7286
7287       </div>
7288       <div class="tags">
7289
7290
7291         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
7292
7293
7294       </div>
7295     </div>
7296     <div class="padding"></div>
7297
7298     <div class="entry">
7299       <div class="title">
7300         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html">Perl modules used by FixMyStreet which are missing in Debian/Squeeze</a>
7301       </div>
7302       <div class="date">
7303         26th July 2011
7304       </div>
7305       <div class="body">
7306         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
7307 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
7308 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
7309 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
7310 security support for a few years.</p>
7311
7312 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
7313 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
7314 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
7315 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
7316 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
7317 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
7318 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
7319 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
7320 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
7321 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
7322 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
7323 easier in the future.</p>
7324
7325 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
7326 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
7327 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
7328 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
7329 do not have time for.</p>
7330
7331       </div>
7332       <div class="tags">
7333
7334
7335         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>.
7336
7337
7338       </div>
7339     </div>
7340     <div class="padding"></div>
7341
7342     <div class="entry">
7343       <div class="title">
7344         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html">A Norwegian FixMyStreet have kept me busy the last few weeks</a>
7345       </div>
7346       <div class="date">
7347          3rd April 2011
7348       </div>
7349       <div class="body">
7350         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
7351 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
7352 update in English.</p>
7353
7354 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
7355 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
7356 of the British service
7357 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
7358 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
7359 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
7360 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
7361 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
7362 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
7363 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
7364 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
7365 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
7366 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
7367 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
7368 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
7369 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
7370
7371 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
7372 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
7373 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
7374 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
7375 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
7376 public infrastructure.</p>
7377
7378 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
7379 such service?</p>
7380
7381       </div>
7382       <div class="tags">
7383
7384
7385         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>.
7386
7387
7388       </div>
7389     </div>
7390     <div class="padding"></div>
7391
7392     <div class="entry">
7393       <div class="title">
7394         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html">Using NVD and CPE to track CVEs in locally maintained software</a>
7395       </div>
7396       <div class="date">
7397         28th January 2011
7398       </div>
7399       <div class="body">
7400         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
7401 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
7402 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
7403 available on the Internet, and check our locally
7404 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
7405 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
7406 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
7407 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
7408 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
7409 out which security holes were present in our free software
7410 collection.</p>
7411
7412 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
7413 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
7414 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
7415 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
7416 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
7417 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
7418 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
7419 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
7420 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
7421 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
7422 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
7423 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
7424 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
7425 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
7426 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
7427 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
7428
7429 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
7430 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
7431 check out, one could look up
7432 <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
7433 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
7434 The most recent one is
7435 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
7436 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
7437 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
7438
7439 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
7440 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
7441 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
7442 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
7443 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
7444 security issues out.</p>
7445
7446 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
7447 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
7448 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
7449 RHEL is providing
7450 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
7451 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
7452 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
7453
7454 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
7455 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
7456 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
7457 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
7458 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
7459 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
7460 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
7461 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
7462 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
7463 established soon.</p>
7464
7465 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
7466 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
7467 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
7468 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
7469 for their packages.</p>
7470
7471       </div>
7472       <div class="tags">
7473
7474
7475         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
7476
7477
7478       </div>
7479     </div>
7480     <div class="padding"></div>
7481
7482     <div class="entry">
7483       <div class="title">
7484         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html">Which module is loaded for a given PCI and USB device?</a>
7485       </div>
7486       <div class="date">
7487         23rd January 2011
7488       </div>
7489       <div class="body">
7490         <p>In the
7491 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
7492 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
7493 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
7494 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
7495 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
7496 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
7497 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
7498 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
7499 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
7500 one of my machines like this:</p>
7501
7502 <pre>
7503 loaded modules:
7504 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
7505 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
7506 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
7507 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
7508 10de:03ec pata_amd
7509 10de:03f6 sata_nv
7510 1022:1103 k8temp
7511 109e:036e bttv
7512 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
7513 11ab:4364 sky2
7514 </pre>
7515
7516 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
7517 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
7518
7519 <pre>
7520 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
7521     echo loaded pci modules:
7522     (
7523         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
7524         for address in * ; do
7525             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
7526                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
7527                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
7528                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
7529                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
7530                     echo "$id $module"
7531                 fi
7532             fi
7533         done
7534     )
7535     echo
7536 fi
7537 </pre>
7538
7539 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
7540 mappings:</p>
7541
7542 <pre>
7543 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
7544     echo loaded usb modules:
7545     (
7546         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
7547         for address in * ; do
7548             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
7549                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
7550                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
7551                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
7552                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
7553                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
7554                         echo "$id $module"
7555                     fi
7556                 fi
7557             fi
7558         done
7559     )
7560     echo
7561 fi
7562 </pre>
7563
7564 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
7565 well.</p>
7566
7567       </div>
7568       <div class="tags">
7569
7570
7571         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7572
7573
7574       </div>
7575     </div>
7576     <div class="padding"></div>
7577
7578     <div class="entry">
7579       <div class="title">
7580         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html">How to test if a laptop is working with Linux</a>
7581       </div>
7582       <div class="date">
7583         22nd December 2010
7584       </div>
7585       <div class="body">
7586         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
7587 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
7588 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
7589 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
7590 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
7591 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
7592 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
7593 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
7594 university.</p>
7595
7596 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
7597 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
7598 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
7599 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
7600 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
7601 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
7602 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
7603 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
7604
7605 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
7606 I perform on a new model.</p>
7607
7608 <ul>
7609
7610 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
7611 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
7612 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
7613
7614 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
7615 installation, X.org is working.</li>
7616
7617 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
7618 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
7619 reported by the program.</li>
7620
7621 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
7622 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
7623 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
7624 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
7625 normally test this by playing
7626 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
7627 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
7628
7629 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
7630 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
7631
7632 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
7633 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
7634
7635 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
7636 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
7637
7638 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
7639 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
7640 few.</li>
7641
7642 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
7643 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
7644 notice this.</li>
7645
7646 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
7647 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
7648 resume.</li>
7649
7650 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
7651 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
7652 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
7653 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
7654 not.</li>
7655
7656 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
7657 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
7658 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
7659 existence.</li>
7660
7661 </ul>
7662
7663 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
7664 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
7665 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
7666 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
7667 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
7668 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
7669 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
7670 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
7671
7672       </div>
7673       <div class="tags">
7674
7675
7676         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7677
7678
7679       </div>
7680     </div>
7681     <div class="padding"></div>
7682
7683     <div class="entry">
7684       <div class="title">
7685         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
7686       </div>
7687       <div class="date">
7688         11th December 2010
7689       </div>
7690       <div class="body">
7691         <p>As I continue to explore
7692 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
7693 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
7694 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
7695
7696 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
7697 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
7698 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
7699 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
7700 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
7701 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
7702 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
7703 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
7704 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
7705 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
7706 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
7707 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
7708 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
7709 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
7710 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
7711 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
7712 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
7713 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
7714 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
7715 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
7716
7717 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
7718 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
7719 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
7720 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
7721 If the Skolelinux foundation
7722 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
7723 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
7724 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
7725 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
7726 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
7727 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
7728 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
7729 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
7730
7731 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
7732 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
7733 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
7734 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
7735 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
7736 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
7737 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
7738 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
7739 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
7740 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
7741 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
7742 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
7743 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
7744 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
7745 currencies.</p>
7746
7747 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
7748 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
7749 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
7750 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
7751 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
7752 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
7753 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
7754 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
7755 BitCoins.  Check out
7756 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
7757 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
7758 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
7759 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
7760 yet.</p>
7761
7762 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
7763 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
7764 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
7765 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
7766 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
7767
7768       </div>
7769       <div class="tags">
7770
7771
7772         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
7773
7774
7775       </div>
7776     </div>
7777     <div class="padding"></div>
7778
7779     <div class="entry">
7780       <div class="title">
7781         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money</a>
7782       </div>
7783       <div class="date">
7784         10th December 2010
7785       </div>
7786       <div class="body">
7787         <p>With this weeks lawless
7788 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
7789 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
7790 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
7791 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
7792 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
7793 A blog post from
7794 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
7795 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
7796 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
7797 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
7798 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
7799 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
7800 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
7801
7802 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
7803 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
7804 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
7805 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
7806 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
7807 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
7808 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
7809 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
7810 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
7811 Debian</a> soon.</p>
7812
7813 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
7814 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
7815 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
7816 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
7817 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
7818 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
7819 you can even get
7820 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
7821 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
7822 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
7823 on the current exchange rates.</p>
7824
7825 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
7826 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
7827 donations to the address
7828 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
7829
7830       </div>
7831       <div class="tags">
7832
7833
7834         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
7835
7836
7837       </div>
7838     </div>
7839     <div class="padding"></div>
7840
7841     <div class="entry">
7842       <div class="title">
7843         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
7844       </div>
7845       <div class="date">
7846         27th November 2010
7847       </div>
7848       <div class="body">
7849         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
7850 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
7851 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
7852 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
7853 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
7854 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
7855 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
7856 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
7857
7858 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
7859 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
7860 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
7861 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
7862 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
7863 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
7864 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
7865 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
7866 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
7867 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
7868 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
7869
7870 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
7871 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
7872 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
7873 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
7874 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
7875 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
7876 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
7877 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
7878 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
7879 what is going on.</p>
7880
7881       </div>
7882       <div class="tags">
7883
7884
7885         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
7886
7887
7888       </div>
7889     </div>
7890     <div class="padding"></div>
7891
7892     <div class="entry">
7893       <div class="title">
7894         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades of the Gnome and KDE desktop, now with apt-get autoremove</a>
7895       </div>
7896       <div class="date">
7897         22nd November 2010
7898       </div>
7899       <div class="body">
7900         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
7901 upgrade testing of the
7902 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
7903 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
7904 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
7905 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
7906
7907 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
7908
7909 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
7910
7911 <blockquote><p>
7912   apache2.2-bin
7913   aptdaemon
7914   baobab
7915   binfmt-support
7916   browser-plugin-gnash
7917   cheese-common
7918   cli-common
7919   cups-pk-helper
7920   dmz-cursor-theme
7921   empathy
7922   empathy-common
7923   freedesktop-sound-theme
7924   freeglut3
7925   gconf-defaults-service
7926   gdm-themes
7927   gedit-plugins
7928   geoclue
7929   geoclue-hostip
7930   geoclue-localnet
7931   geoclue-manual
7932   geoclue-yahoo
7933   gnash
7934   gnash-common
7935   gnome
7936   gnome-backgrounds
7937   gnome-cards-data
7938   gnome-codec-install
7939   gnome-core
7940   gnome-desktop-environment
7941   gnome-disk-utility
7942   gnome-screenshot
7943   gnome-search-tool
7944   gnome-session-canberra
7945   gnome-system-log
7946   gnome-themes-extras
7947   gnome-themes-more
7948   gnome-user-share
7949   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
7950   gstreamer0.10-tools
7951   gtk2-engines
7952   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
7953   gtk2-engines-smooth
7954   hamster-applet
7955   libapache2-mod-dnssd
7956   libapr1
7957   libaprutil1
7958   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
7959   libaprutil1-ldap
7960   libart2.0-cil
7961   libboost-date-time1.42.0
7962   libboost-python1.42.0
7963   libboost-thread1.42.0
7964   libchamplain-0.4-0
7965   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
7966   libcheese-gtk18
7967   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
7968   libcryptui0
7969   libdiscid0
7970   libelf1
7971   libepc-1.0-2
7972   libepc-common
7973   libepc-ui-1.0-2
7974   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
7975   libfreerdp0
7976   libgconf2.0-cil
7977   libgdata-common
7978   libgdata7
7979   libgdu-gtk0
7980   libgee2
7981   libgeoclue0
7982   libgexiv2-0
7983   libgif4
7984   libglade2.0-cil
7985   libglib2.0-cil
7986   libgmime2.4-cil
7987   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
7988   libgnome2.24-cil
7989   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
7990   libgpod-common
7991   libgpod4
7992   libgtk2.0-cil
7993   libgtkglext1
7994   libgtksourceview2.0-common
7995   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
7996   libmono-addins0.2-cil
7997   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
7998   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
7999   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
8000   libmono-posix2.0-cil
8001   libmono-security2.0-cil
8002   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
8003   libmono-system2.0-cil
8004   libmtp8
8005   libmusicbrainz3-6
8006   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
8007   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
8008   libopal3.6.8
8009   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
8010   libpt2.6.7
8011   libpython2.6
8012   librpm1
8013   librpmio1
8014   libsdl1.2debian
8015   libsrtp0
8016   libssh-4
8017   libtelepathy-farsight0
8018   libtelepathy-glib0
8019   libtidy-0.99-0
8020   media-player-info
8021   mesa-utils
8022   mono-2.0-gac
8023   mono-gac
8024   mono-runtime
8025   nautilus-sendto
8026   nautilus-sendto-empathy
8027   p7zip-full
8028   pkg-config
8029   python-aptdaemon
8030   python-aptdaemon-gtk
8031   python-axiom
8032   python-beautifulsoup
8033   python-bugbuddy
8034   python-clientform
8035   python-coherence
8036   python-configobj
8037   python-crypto
8038   python-cupshelpers
8039   python-elementtree
8040   python-epsilon
8041   python-evolution
8042   python-feedparser
8043   python-gdata
8044   python-gdbm
8045   python-gst0.10
8046   python-gtkglext1
8047   python-gtksourceview2
8048   python-httplib2
8049   python-louie
8050   python-mako
8051   python-markupsafe
8052   python-mechanize
8053   python-nevow
8054   python-notify
8055   python-opengl
8056   python-openssl
8057   python-pam
8058   python-pkg-resources
8059   python-pyasn1
8060   python-pysqlite2
8061   python-rdflib
8062   python-serial
8063   python-tagpy
8064   python-twisted-bin
8065   python-twisted-conch
8066   python-twisted-core
8067   python-twisted-web
8068   python-utidylib
8069   python-webkit
8070   python-xdg
8071   python-zope.interface
8072   remmina
8073   remmina-plugin-data
8074   remmina-plugin-rdp
8075   remmina-plugin-vnc
8076   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
8077   rhythmbox-plugins
8078   rpm-common
8079   rpm2cpio
8080   seahorse-plugins
8081   shotwell
8082   software-center
8083   system-config-printer-udev
8084   telepathy-gabble
8085   telepathy-mission-control-5
8086   telepathy-salut
8087   tomboy
8088   totem
8089   totem-coherence
8090   totem-mozilla
8091   totem-plugins
8092   transmission-common
8093   xdg-user-dirs
8094   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
8095   xserver-xephyr
8096 </p></blockquote>
8097
8098 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
8099
8100 <blockquote><p>
8101   cheese
8102   ekiga
8103   eog
8104   epiphany-extensions
8105   evolution-exchange
8106   fast-user-switch-applet
8107   file-roller
8108   gcalctool
8109   gconf-editor
8110   gdm
8111   gedit
8112   gedit-common
8113   gnome-games
8114   gnome-games-data
8115   gnome-nettool
8116   gnome-system-tools
8117   gnome-themes
8118   gnuchess
8119   gucharmap
8120   guile-1.8-libs
8121   libavahi-ui0
8122   libdmx1
8123   libgalago3
8124   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
8125   libgtksourceview2.0-0
8126   liblircclient0
8127   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
8128   libspeexdsp1
8129   libsvga1
8130   rhythmbox
8131   seahorse
8132   sound-juicer
8133   system-config-printer
8134   totem-common
8135   transmission-gtk
8136   vinagre
8137   vino
8138 </p></blockquote>
8139
8140 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
8141
8142 <blockquote><p>
8143   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
8144 </p></blockquote>
8145
8146 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
8147
8148 <blockquote><p>
8149 [nothing]
8150 </p></blockquote>
8151
8152 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
8153
8154 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
8155
8156 <blockquote><p>
8157   ksmserver
8158 </p></blockquote>
8159
8160 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
8161
8162 <blockquote><p>
8163   kwin
8164   network-manager-kde
8165 </p></blockquote>
8166
8167 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
8168
8169 <blockquote><p>
8170   arts
8171   dolphin
8172   freespacenotifier
8173   google-gadgets-gst
8174   google-gadgets-xul
8175   kappfinder
8176   kcalc
8177   kcharselect
8178   kde-core
8179   kde-plasma-desktop
8180   kde-standard
8181   kde-window-manager
8182   kdeartwork
8183   kdeartwork-emoticons
8184   kdeartwork-style
8185   kdeartwork-theme-icon
8186   kdebase
8187   kdebase-apps
8188   kdebase-workspace
8189   kdebase-workspace-bin
8190   kdebase-workspace-data
8191   kdeeject
8192   kdelibs
8193   kdeplasma-addons
8194   kdeutils
8195   kdewallpapers
8196   kdf
8197   kfloppy
8198   kgpg
8199   khelpcenter4
8200   kinfocenter
8201   konq-plugins-l10n
8202   konqueror-nsplugins
8203   kscreensaver
8204   kscreensaver-xsavers
8205   ktimer
8206   kwrite
8207   libgle3
8208   libkde4-ruby1.8
8209   libkonq5
8210   libkonq5-templates
8211   libnetpbm10
8212   libplasma-ruby
8213   libplasma-ruby1.8
8214   libqt4-ruby1.8
8215   marble-data
8216   marble-plugins
8217   netpbm
8218   nuvola-icon-theme
8219   plasma-dataengines-workspace
8220   plasma-desktop
8221   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
8222   plasma-runners-addons
8223   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
8224   plasma-scriptengine-python
8225   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
8226   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
8227   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
8228   plasma-scriptengines
8229   plasma-wallpapers-addons
8230   plasma-widget-folderview
8231   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
8232   ruby
8233   sweeper
8234   update-notifier-kde
8235   xscreensaver-data-extra
8236   xscreensaver-gl
8237   xscreensaver-gl-extra
8238   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
8239 </p></blockquote>
8240
8241 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
8242
8243 <blockquote><p>
8244   ark
8245   google-gadgets-common
8246   google-gadgets-qt
8247   htdig
8248   kate
8249   kdebase-bin
8250   kdebase-data
8251   kdepasswd
8252   kfind
8253   klipper
8254   konq-plugins
8255   konqueror
8256   ksysguard
8257   ksysguardd
8258   libarchive1
8259   libcln6
8260   libeet1
8261   libeina-svn-06
8262   libggadget-1.0-0b
8263   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
8264   libgps19
8265   libkdecorations4
8266   libkephal4
8267   libkonq4
8268   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
8269   libkscreensaver5
8270   libksgrd4
8271   libksignalplotter4
8272   libkunitconversion4
8273   libkwineffects1a
8274   libmarblewidget4
8275   libntrack-qt4-1
8276   libntrack0
8277   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
8278   libplasmaclock4a
8279   libplasmagenericshell4
8280   libprocesscore4a
8281   libprocessui4a
8282   libqalculate5
8283   libqedje0a
8284   libqtruby4shared2
8285   libqzion0a
8286   libruby1.8
8287   libscim8c2a
8288   libsmokekdecore4-3
8289   libsmokekdeui4-3
8290   libsmokekfile3
8291   libsmokekhtml3
8292   libsmokekio3
8293   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
8294   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
8295   libsmokekparts3
8296   libsmokektexteditor3
8297   libsmokekutils3
8298   libsmokenepomuk3
8299   libsmokephonon3
8300   libsmokeplasma3
8301   libsmokeqtcore4-3
8302   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
8303   libsmokeqtgui4-3
8304   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
8305   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
8306   libsmokeqtscript4-3
8307   libsmokeqtsql4-3
8308   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
8309   libsmokeqttest4-3
8310   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
8311   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
8312   libsmokeqtxml4-3
8313   libsmokesolid3
8314   libsmokesoprano3
8315   libtaskmanager4a
8316   libtidy-0.99-0
8317   libweather-ion4a
8318   libxklavier16
8319   libxxf86misc1
8320   okteta
8321   oxygencursors
8322   plasma-dataengines-addons
8323   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
8324   plasma-widget-lancelot
8325   plasma-widgets-addons
8326   plasma-widgets-workspace
8327   polkit-kde-1
8328   ruby1.8
8329   systemsettings
8330   update-notifier-common
8331 </p></blockquote>
8332
8333 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
8334 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
8335 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
8336 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
8337
8338       </div>
8339       <div class="tags">
8340
8341
8342         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8343
8344
8345       </div>
8346     </div>
8347     <div class="padding"></div>
8348
8349     <div class="entry">
8350       <div class="title">
8351         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html">Migrating Xen virtual machines using LVM to KVM using disk images</a>
8352       </div>
8353       <div class="date">
8354         22nd November 2010
8355       </div>
8356       <div class="body">
8357         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
8358 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
8359 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
8360 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
8361 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
8362 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
8363 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
8364 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
8365 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
8366
8367 <p>I found
8368 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
8369 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
8370 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
8371 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
8372 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
8373 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
8374
8375 <pre>
8376 #!/bin/sh
8377
8378 # Based on
8379 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
8380
8381 set -e
8382 set -x
8383
8384 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
8385     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
8386     exit 1
8387 else
8388     host="$1"
8389 fi
8390
8391 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
8392     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
8393     exit 1
8394 fi
8395
8396 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
8397 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
8398 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
8399 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
8400
8401 img=$host.img
8402 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
8403 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
8404
8405 parted $img mklabel msdos
8406 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
8407 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
8408 parted $img set 1 boot on
8409
8410 modprobe dm-mod
8411 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
8412 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
8413
8414 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
8415 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
8416 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
8417
8418 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
8419 losetup -d /dev/loop0
8420 </pre>
8421
8422 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
8423 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
8424
8425 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
8426 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
8427 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
8428 seem to work just fine.</p>
8429
8430       </div>
8431       <div class="tags">
8432
8433
8434         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8435
8436
8437       </div>
8438     </div>
8439     <div class="padding"></div>
8440
8441     <div class="entry">
8442       <div class="title">
8443         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome and KDE desktop</a>
8444       </div>
8445       <div class="date">
8446         20th November 2010
8447       </div>
8448       <div class="body">
8449         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
8450 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
8451 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
8452 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
8453
8454 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
8455 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
8456 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
8457
8458 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
8459
8460 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
8461
8462 <blockquote><p>
8463   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
8464   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
8465   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
8466   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
8467   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
8468   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
8469   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
8470   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
8471   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
8472   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
8473   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
8474   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
8475   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
8476   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
8477   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
8478   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
8479   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
8480   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
8481   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
8482   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
8483   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
8484   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
8485   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
8486   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
8487   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
8488   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
8489   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
8490   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
8491   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
8492   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
8493   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
8494   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
8495   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
8496   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
8497   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
8498   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
8499   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
8500   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
8501   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
8502   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
8503   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
8504   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
8505   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
8506   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
8507   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
8508   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
8509   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
8510   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
8511   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
8512   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
8513   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
8514   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
8515   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
8516   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
8517   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
8518   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
8519   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
8520   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
8521   zip
8522 </p></blockquote>
8523
8524 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
8525
8526 <blockquote><p>
8527   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
8528   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
8529   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
8530   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
8531   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
8532   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
8533   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
8534   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
8535   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
8536   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
8537   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
8538   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
8539   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
8540   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
8541   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
8542   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
8543   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
8544   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
8545   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
8546   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
8547   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
8548   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
8549   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
8550   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
8551   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
8552   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
8553   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
8554   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
8555   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
8556 </p></blockquote>
8557
8558 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
8559
8560 <blockquote><p>
8561   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
8562 </p></blockquote>
8563
8564 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
8565
8566 <blockquote><p>
8567 [nothing]
8568 </p></blockquote>
8569
8570 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
8571
8572 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
8573
8574 <blockquote><p>
8575   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
8576   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
8577   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
8578   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
8579   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
8580   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
8581   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
8582   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
8583   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
8584   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
8585   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
8586   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
8587   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
8588   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
8589   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
8590   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
8591   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
8592   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
8593   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
8594   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
8595   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
8596   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
8597   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
8598   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
8599   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
8600   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
8601   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
8602   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
8603   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
8604   ttf-sazanami-gothic
8605 </p></blockquote>
8606
8607 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
8608
8609 <blockquote><p>
8610   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
8611   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
8612   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
8613   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
8614   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
8615   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
8616   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
8617   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
8618   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
8619   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
8620   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
8621   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
8622   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
8623   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
8624   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
8625   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
8626   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
8627   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
8628   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
8629   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
8630   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
8631   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
8632   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
8633   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
8634   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
8635   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
8636   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
8637   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
8638   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
8639   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
8640   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
8641   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
8642   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
8643 </p></blockquote>
8644
8645 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
8646
8647 <blockquote><p>
8648   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
8649   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
8650   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
8651   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
8652   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
8653   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
8654   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
8655 </p></blockquote>
8656
8657 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
8658
8659 <blockquote><p>
8660   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
8661 </p></blockquote>
8662
8663       </div>
8664       <div class="tags">
8665
8666
8667         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8668
8669
8670       </div>
8671     </div>
8672     <div class="padding"></div>
8673
8674     <div class="entry">
8675       <div class="title">
8676         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
8677       </div>
8678       <div class="date">
8679         20th November 2010
8680       </div>
8681       <div class="body">
8682         <p>Answering
8683 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
8684 call from the Gnash project</a> for
8685 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
8686 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
8687 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
8688 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
8689 releases out more often.</p>
8690
8691 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
8692 I have considered setting up a <a
8693 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
8694 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
8695 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
8696 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
8697 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
8698 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
8699 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
8700 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
8701 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
8702 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
8703 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
8704 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
8705
8706       </div>
8707       <div class="tags">
8708
8709
8710         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
8711
8712
8713       </div>
8714     </div>
8715     <div class="padding"></div>
8716
8717     <div class="entry">
8718       <div class="title">
8719         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
8720       </div>
8721       <div class="date">
8722          9th November 2010
8723       </div>
8724       <div class="body">
8725         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
8726
8727 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
8728 3D linked in from
8729 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
8730 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
8731
8732       </div>
8733       <div class="tags">
8734
8735
8736         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8737
8738
8739       </div>
8740     </div>
8741     <div class="padding"></div>
8742
8743     <div class="entry">
8744       <div class="title">
8745         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
8746       </div>
8747       <div class="date">
8748         24th October 2010
8749       </div>
8750       <div class="body">
8751         <p>Some updates.</p>
8752
8753 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
8754 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
8755 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
8756 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
8757 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
8758 :)</p>
8759
8760 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
8761 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
8762 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
8763 It is called
8764 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
8765 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
8766 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
8767 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
8768 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
8769 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
8770
8771 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
8772 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
8773 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
8774 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
8775 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
8776 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
8777 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
8778 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
8779 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
8780 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
8781
8782       </div>
8783       <div class="tags">
8784
8785
8786         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
8787
8788
8789       </div>
8790     </div>
8791     <div class="padding"></div>
8792
8793     <div class="entry">
8794       <div class="title">
8795         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html">Some notes on Flash in Debian and Debian Edu</a>
8796       </div>
8797       <div class="date">
8798          4th September 2010
8799       </div>
8800       <div class="body">
8801         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
8802 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
8803 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
8804 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
8805 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
8806 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
8807 installed.</p>
8808
8809 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
8810 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
8811 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
8812 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
8813 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
8814 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
8815 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
8816 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
8817 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
8818
8819 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
8820 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
8821 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
8822 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
8823 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
8824 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
8825 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
8826 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
8827 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
8828 pages they want to visit.</p>
8829
8830 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
8831 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
8832 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
8833 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
8834 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
8835 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
8836 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
8837 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
8838 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
8839 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
8840 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
8841
8842       </div>
8843       <div class="tags">
8844
8845
8846         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
8847
8848
8849       </div>
8850     </div>
8851     <div class="padding"></div>
8852
8853     <div class="entry">
8854       <div class="title">
8855         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
8856       </div>
8857       <div class="date">
8858         27th July 2010
8859       </div>
8860       <div class="body">
8861         <p>I discovered this while doing
8862 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
8863 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
8864 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
8865 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
8866 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
8867
8868 <p>An example is from todays
8869 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
8870 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
8871 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
8872 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
8873 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
8874 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
8875 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
8876
8877 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
8878
8879 <blockquote><pre>
8880 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
8881  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
8882   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
8883 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
8884  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
8885 </pre></blockquote>
8886
8887 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
8888 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
8889 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
8890 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
8891 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
8892 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
8893 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
8894 of dependency loops.</p>
8895
8896 <p>Thanks to
8897 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
8898 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
8899 dependencies
8900 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
8901 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
8902
8903 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
8904 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
8905 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
8906 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
8907 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
8908 it.</p>
8909
8910       </div>
8911       <div class="tags">
8912
8913
8914         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
8915
8916
8917       </div>
8918     </div>
8919     <div class="padding"></div>
8920
8921     <div class="entry">
8922       <div class="title">
8923         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html">What are they searching for - PowerDNS and ISC DHCP in LDAP</a>
8924       </div>
8925       <div class="date">
8926         17th July 2010
8927       </div>
8928       <div class="body">
8929         <p>This is a
8930 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
8931 on my
8932 <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
8933 work</a> on
8934 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
8935 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
8936
8937 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
8938 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
8939 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
8940 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
8941
8942 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
8943 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
8944 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
8945
8946 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
8947
8948 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
8949 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
8950 the web.
8951
8952 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
8953 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
8954 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
8955 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
8956 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
8957 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
8958
8959 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
8960 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
8961 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
8962 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
8963 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
8964 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
8965 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
8966 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
8967 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
8968 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
8969 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
8970 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
8971 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
8972 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
8973 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
8974 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
8975
8976 <blockquote><pre>
8977 ldapsearch -h ldap \
8978   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
8979   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
8980   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
8981   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
8982   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
8983   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
8984
8985 ldapsearch -h ldap \
8986   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
8987   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
8988   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
8989   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
8990   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
8991 </pre></blockquote>
8992
8993 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
8994 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
8995 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
8996 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8997 also exist.</p>
8998
8999 <blockquote><pre>
9000 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9001 objectclass: top
9002 objectclass: dnsdomain
9003 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
9004 dc: tjener
9005 arecord: 10.0.2.2
9006 associateddomain: tjener.intern
9007
9008 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9009 objectclass: top
9010 objectclass: dnsdomain2
9011 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
9012 dc: 2
9013 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
9014 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
9015 </pre></blockquote>
9016
9017 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
9018 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
9019 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
9020 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
9021 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
9022 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
9023 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
9024 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
9025 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
9026 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
9027 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
9028 instead.</p>
9029
9030 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
9031 like this:</p>
9032
9033 <blockquote><pre>
9034 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
9035   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
9036   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
9037   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
9038   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
9039   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
9040
9041 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
9042   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
9043 </pre></blockquote>
9044
9045 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
9046 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
9047 reverse lookups.</p>
9048
9049 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
9050 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
9051 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
9052 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
9053
9054 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
9055 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
9056 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
9057
9058 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
9059 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
9060 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
9061 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
9062 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
9063
9064 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
9065 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
9066 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
9067 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
9068 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
9069
9070 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
9071 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
9072 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
9073 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
9074 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
9075 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
9076
9077 <blockquote><pre>
9078 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
9079     SUP top
9080     AUXILIARY
9081     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
9082           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
9083           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
9084           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
9085           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
9086     ))
9087 </pre></blockquote>
9088
9089 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
9090 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
9091 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
9092 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
9093 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
9094 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
9095
9096 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
9097
9098 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
9099 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
9100 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
9101 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
9102 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
9103
9104 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
9105 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
9106 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
9107 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
9108
9109 <blockquote><pre>
9110 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
9111 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
9112 </pre></blockquote>
9113
9114 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
9115 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
9116 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
9117 search result is this entry:</p>
9118
9119 <blockquote><pre>
9120 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9121 cn: dhcp
9122 objectClass: top
9123 objectClass: dhcpServer
9124 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9125 </pre></blockquote>
9126
9127 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
9128 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
9129 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
9130 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
9131 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
9132 The search result is this entry:</p>
9133
9134 <blockquote><pre>
9135 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9136 cn: DHCP Config
9137 objectClass: top
9138 objectClass: dhcpService
9139 objectClass: dhcpOptions
9140 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9141 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
9142 dhcpStatements: authoritative
9143 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
9144 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
9145 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
9146 </pre></blockquote>
9147
9148 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
9149 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
9150 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
9151 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
9152 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
9153 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
9154 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
9155 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
9156 related computer objects.</p>
9157
9158 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
9159 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
9160 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
9161 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
9162 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
9163 like:</p>
9164
9165 <blockquote><pre>
9166 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9167 cn: hostname
9168 objectClass: top
9169 objectClass: dhcpHost
9170 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
9171 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
9172 </pre></blockquote>
9173
9174 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
9175 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
9176 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
9177 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
9178 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
9179 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
9180 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
9181 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
9182 structural object class.
9183
9184 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
9185
9186 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
9187 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
9188 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
9189 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
9190 in the configuration.</p>
9191
9192 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
9193 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
9194 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
9195 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
9196 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
9197 structure.</p>
9198
9199 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
9200 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
9201
9202 <blockquote><pre>
9203 ou=services
9204   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
9205     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
9206     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
9207       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
9208         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
9209     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
9210       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
9211         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
9212     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
9213       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
9214 </pre></blockquote>
9215
9216 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
9217 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
9218 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
9219 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
9220
9221 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
9222 like this:</p>
9223
9224 <blockquote><pre>
9225 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9226 dc: hostname
9227 objectClass: top
9228 objectClass: dhcpHost
9229 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
9230 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
9231 associateddomain: hostname.intern
9232 arecord: 10.11.12.13
9233 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
9234 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
9235 </pre></blockquote>
9236
9237 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
9238 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
9239 auxiliary object class.</p>
9240
9241       </div>
9242       <div class="tags">
9243
9244
9245         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
9246
9247
9248       </div>
9249     </div>
9250     <div class="padding"></div>
9251
9252     <div class="entry">
9253       <div class="title">
9254         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
9255       </div>
9256       <div class="date">
9257         14th July 2010
9258       </div>
9259       <div class="body">
9260         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
9261 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
9262 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
9263 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
9264 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
9265
9266 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
9267 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
9268
9269 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
9270 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
9271 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
9272 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
9273 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
9274 to a slave DNS server.</p>
9275
9276 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
9277 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
9278 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
9279 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
9280 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
9281 seem to work.</p>
9282
9283 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
9284 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
9285 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
9286 this:</p>
9287
9288 <blockquote><pre>
9289   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9290   cn: hostname
9291   objectClass: dhcphost
9292   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
9293   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
9294   associateddomain: hostname.intern
9295   arecord: 10.11.12.13
9296   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
9297   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
9298   ldapconfigsound: Y
9299 </pre></blockquote>
9300
9301 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
9302 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
9303 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
9304 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
9305
9306 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
9307 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
9308 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
9309 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
9310 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
9311 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
9312 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
9313 might be a good place to put it.</p>
9314
9315 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
9316 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
9317
9318       </div>
9319       <div class="tags">
9320
9321
9322         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
9323
9324
9325       </div>
9326     </div>
9327     <div class="padding"></div>
9328
9329     <div class="entry">
9330       <div class="title">
9331         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
9332       </div>
9333       <div class="date">
9334         11th July 2010
9335       </div>
9336       <div class="body">
9337         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
9338 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
9339 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
9340 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
9341
9342 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
9343 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
9344 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
9345 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
9346 LTSP clients.</p>
9347
9348 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
9349 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
9350 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
9351
9352 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
9353 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
9354 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
9355
9356 <blockquote><pre>
9357 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
9358 #
9359 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
9360 #
9361 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
9362 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
9363 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
9364 #
9365 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
9366 # existence of attribute names.
9367 #
9368 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
9369 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
9370 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
9371 #
9372 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
9373 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
9374 #
9375 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
9376 #     SUP top
9377 #     AUXILIARY
9378 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
9379
9380 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
9381 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
9382     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
9383     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
9384         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
9385         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
9386             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
9387             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
9388             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
9389             # bass value on to clients
9390             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
9391         done
9392     done
9393 fi
9394 </pre></blockquote>
9395
9396 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
9397 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
9398 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
9399 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
9400 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
9401
9402 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
9403 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
9404
9405 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
9406 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
9407 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
9408 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
9409 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
9410 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
9411
9412       </div>
9413       <div class="tags">
9414
9415
9416         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
9417
9418
9419       </div>
9420     </div>
9421     <div class="padding"></div>
9422
9423     <div class="entry">
9424       <div class="title">
9425         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
9426       </div>
9427       <div class="date">
9428          9th July 2010
9429       </div>
9430       <div class="body">
9431         <p>Since
9432 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
9433 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
9434 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
9435 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
9436 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
9437 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
9438 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
9439 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
9440 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
9441 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
9442 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
9443 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
9444 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
9445
9446       </div>
9447       <div class="tags">
9448
9449
9450         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
9451
9452
9453       </div>
9454     </div>
9455     <div class="padding"></div>
9456
9457     <div class="entry">
9458       <div class="title">
9459         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop</a>
9460       </div>
9461       <div class="date">
9462          3rd July 2010
9463       </div>
9464       <div class="body">
9465         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
9466 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
9467 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
9468 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
9469 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
9470 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
9471 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
9472 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
9473
9474 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
9475 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
9476 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
9477 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
9478 publish the difference.</p>
9479
9480 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
9481
9482 <blockquote><p>
9483   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
9484   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
9485   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
9486   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
9487   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
9488   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
9489   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
9490   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
9491 </p></blockquote>
9492
9493 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
9494
9495 <blockquote><p>
9496   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
9497   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
9498   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
9499   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
9500   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
9501   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
9502   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
9503   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
9504   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
9505   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
9506   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
9507   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
9508   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
9509   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
9510   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
9511   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
9512   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
9513   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
9514   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
9515   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
9516 </p></blockquote>
9517
9518 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
9519
9520 <blockquote><p>
9521   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
9522   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
9523   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
9524   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
9525   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
9526   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
9527   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
9528   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
9529   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
9530   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
9531   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
9532   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
9533   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
9534   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
9535   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
9536   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
9537   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
9538   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
9539   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
9540   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
9541   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
9542 </p></blockquote>
9543
9544 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
9545
9546 <blockquote><p>
9547   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
9548   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
9549   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
9550 </p></blockquote>
9551
9552 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
9553 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
9554 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
9555 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
9556 the difference somewhat.
9557
9558       </div>
9559       <div class="tags">
9560
9561
9562         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9563
9564
9565       </div>
9566     </div>
9567     <div class="padding"></div>
9568
9569     <div class="entry">
9570       <div class="title">
9571         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
9572       </div>
9573       <div class="date">
9574         28th June 2010
9575       </div>
9576       <div class="body">
9577         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
9578 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
9579 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
9580 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
9581 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
9582 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
9583 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
9584 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
9585 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
9586 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
9587
9588 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
9589 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
9590 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
9591 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
9592 released.</p>
9593
9594 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
9595 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
9596 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
9597 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
9598
9599 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
9600 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
9601
9602 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
9603 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
9604 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
9605 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
9606 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
9607
9608       </div>
9609       <div class="tags">
9610
9611
9612         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
9613
9614
9615       </div>
9616     </div>
9617     <div class="padding"></div>
9618
9619     <div class="entry">
9620       <div class="title">
9621         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html">Idea for a change to LDAP schemas allowing DNS and DHCP info to be combined into one object</a>
9622       </div>
9623       <div class="date">
9624         24th June 2010
9625       </div>
9626       <div class="body">
9627         <p>A while back, I
9628 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
9629 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
9630 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
9631 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
9632
9633 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
9634 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
9635 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
9636 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
9637
9638 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
9639 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
9640 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
9641 Debian Edu.</p>
9642
9643 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
9644 the
9645 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
9646 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
9647 available today from IETF.</p>
9648
9649 <pre>
9650 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
9651 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
9652 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
9653  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
9654         NAME 'dhcpHost'
9655         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
9656 -       SUP top
9657 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
9658         MUST cn
9659         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
9660         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
9661 </pre>
9662
9663 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
9664 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
9665 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
9666
9667 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
9668 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
9669
9670       </div>
9671       <div class="tags">
9672
9673
9674         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
9675
9676
9677       </div>
9678     </div>
9679     <div class="padding"></div>
9680
9681     <div class="entry">
9682       <div class="title">
9683         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html">Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output</a>
9684       </div>
9685       <div class="date">
9686         16th June 2010
9687       </div>
9688       <div class="body">
9689         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
9690 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
9691 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
9692 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
9693 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
9694 this:
9695
9696 <blockquote><pre>
9697 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
9698 tasksel --new-install
9699 </pre></blockquote>
9700
9701 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
9702 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
9703 any output what so ever.
9704
9705 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
9706 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
9707 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
9708 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
9709 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
9710 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
9711 code like this:
9712
9713 <blockquote><pre>
9714 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
9715 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
9716 $cmd
9717 </pre></blockquote>
9718
9719 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
9720 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
9721 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
9722 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
9723 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
9724 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
9725 installation.</p>
9726
9727 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
9728 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
9729 like this.</p>
9730
9731       </div>
9732       <div class="tags">
9733
9734
9735         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
9736
9737
9738       </div>
9739     </div>
9740     <div class="padding"></div>
9741
9742     <div class="entry">
9743       <div class="title">
9744         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, removals by apt and aptitude</a>
9745       </div>
9746       <div class="date">
9747         13th June 2010
9748       </div>
9749       <div class="body">
9750         <p>My
9751 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
9752 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
9753 finally made the upgrade logs available from
9754 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
9755 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
9756 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
9757 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
9758
9759 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
9760 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
9761 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
9762 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
9763 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
9764 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
9765 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
9766 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
9767
9768 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
9769 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
9770 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
9771 too surprising.</p>
9772
9773 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
9774 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
9775 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
9776 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
9777 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
9778 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
9779 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
9780 continue.</p>
9781
9782 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
9783 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
9784   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
9785   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
9786   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
9787   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
9788   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
9789   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
9790   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
9791   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
9792   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
9793   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
9794   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
9795   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
9796   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
9797   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
9798   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
9799   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
9800   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
9801   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
9802   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
9803   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
9804   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
9805   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
9806   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
9807   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
9808   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
9809   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
9810   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
9811   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
9812
9813 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
9814
9815 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
9816   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
9817   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
9818   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
9819   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
9820   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
9821   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
9822   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
9823   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
9824   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
9825   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
9826   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
9827   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
9828   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
9829   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
9830   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
9831   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
9832   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
9833   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
9834   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
9835   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
9836   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
9837   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
9838   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
9839   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
9840   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
9841   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
9842   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
9843   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
9844   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
9845   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
9846   zip</p>
9847
9848 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
9849
9850 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
9851   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
9852   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
9853   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
9854   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
9855   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
9856   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
9857   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
9858   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
9859   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
9860   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
9861   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
9862   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
9863   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
9864   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
9865   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
9866   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
9867   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
9868   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
9869   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
9870   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
9871   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
9872   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
9873   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
9874   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
9875   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
9876   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
9877   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
9878
9879 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
9880 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
9881   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
9882   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
9883   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
9884   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
9885   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
9886   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
9887   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
9888   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
9889   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
9890   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
9891   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
9892   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
9893   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
9894   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
9895   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
9896   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
9897   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
9898   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
9899   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
9900   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
9901   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
9902   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
9903   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
9904   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
9905   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
9906   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
9907   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
9908   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
9909   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
9910   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
9911   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
9912   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
9913   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
9914   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
9915   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
9916   xulrunner-1.9</p>
9917
9918
9919       </div>
9920       <div class="tags">
9921
9922
9923         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9924
9925
9926       </div>
9927     </div>
9928     <div class="padding"></div>
9929
9930     <div class="entry">
9931       <div class="title">
9932         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
9933       </div>
9934       <div class="date">
9935         11th June 2010
9936       </div>
9937       <div class="body">
9938         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
9939 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
9940 have been discovered and reported in the process
9941 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
9942 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
9943 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
9944 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
9945 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
9946
9947 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
9948 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
9949 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
9950 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
9951 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
9952 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
9953
9954 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
9955 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
9956 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
9957 is created.  The bug report
9958 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
9959 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
9960 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
9961 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
9962 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
9963 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
9964 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
9965 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
9966 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
9967 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
9968 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
9969 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
9970 Debian Squeeze.</p>
9971
9972 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
9973 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
9974 trick:</p>
9975
9976 <blockquote><pre>
9977 #!/bin/sh
9978 set -ex
9979
9980 if [ "$1" ] ; then
9981     desktop=$1
9982 else
9983     desktop=gnome
9984 fi
9985
9986 from=lenny
9987 to=squeeze
9988
9989 exec &lt; /dev/null
9990 unset LANG
9991 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
9992 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
9993 fuser -mv .
9994 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
9995 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
9996 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
9997 #!/bin/sh
9998 exit 101
9999 EOF
10000 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
10001 exit_cleanup() {
10002     umount $tmpdir/proc
10003 }
10004 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
10005 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
10006 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
10007
10008 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
10009
10010 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
10011 # to return the correct answers.
10012 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
10013     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
10014
10015 # Include the desktop and laptop task
10016 for test in desktop laptop ; do
10017     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
10018 #!/bin/sh
10019 exit 2
10020 EOF
10021     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
10022 done
10023
10024 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
10025 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
10026 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
10027 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
10028
10029 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
10030 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
10031 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
10032 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
10033 fuser -mv
10034 </pre></blockquote>
10035
10036 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
10037 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
10038 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
10039 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
10040 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
10041 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
10042
10043 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
10044 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
10045 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
10046 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
10047 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
10048 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
10049 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
10050
10051 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
10052 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
10053 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
10054 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
10055 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
10056 packages.</p>
10057
10058       </div>
10059       <div class="tags">
10060
10061
10062         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10063
10064
10065       </div>
10066     </div>
10067     <div class="padding"></div>
10068
10069     <div class="entry">
10070       <div class="title">
10071         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html">Upstart or sysvinit - as init.d scripts see it</a>
10072       </div>
10073       <div class="date">
10074          6th June 2010
10075       </div>
10076       <div class="body">
10077         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
10078 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
10079 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
10080 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
10081 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
10082 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
10083 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
10084
10085 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
10086 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
10087 COLUMNS):</p>
10088
10089 <blockquote><pre>
10090 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
10091 previous=N
10092 PREVLEVEL=
10093 RUNLEVEL=
10094 runlevel=S
10095 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
10096 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
10097 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
10098 </pre></blockquote>
10099
10100 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
10101 script.</p>
10102
10103 <blockquote><pre>
10104 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
10105 previous=N
10106 PREVLEVEL=N
10107 RUNLEVEL=S
10108 runlevel=S
10109 </pre></blockquote>
10110
10111 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
10112 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
10113 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
10114
10115 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
10116 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
10117 choice.</p>
10118
10119       </div>
10120       <div class="tags">
10121
10122
10123         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10124
10125
10126       </div>
10127     </div>
10128     <div class="padding"></div>
10129
10130     <div class="entry">
10131       <div class="title">
10132         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
10133       </div>
10134       <div class="date">
10135          6th June 2010
10136       </div>
10137       <div class="body">
10138         <p>Via the
10139 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
10140 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
10141 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
10142 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
10143 following the standards wars of today.</p>
10144
10145       </div>
10146       <div class="tags">
10147
10148
10149         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
10150
10151
10152       </div>
10153     </div>
10154     <div class="padding"></div>
10155
10156     <div class="entry">
10157       <div class="title">
10158         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing computer hardware models used at site</a>
10159       </div>
10160       <div class="date">
10161          3rd June 2010
10162       </div>
10163       <div class="body">
10164         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
10165 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
10166 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
10167 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
10168 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
10169
10170 <blockquote><pre>
10171 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
10172   vendor                    count
10173   Dell Computer Corporation     1
10174     PowerEdge 1750              1
10175   IBM                           1
10176     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
10177   Intel                         2
10178   [no-dmi-info]                 3
10179 maintainer:~#
10180 </pre></blockquote>
10181
10182 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
10183 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
10184 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
10185 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
10186 option to list the individual machines.</p>
10187
10188 <p>A larger list is
10189 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
10190 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
10191 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
10192 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
10193 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
10194 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
10195 collector.</p>
10196
10197       </div>
10198       <div class="tags">
10199
10200
10201         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
10202
10203
10204       </div>
10205     </div>
10206     <div class="padding"></div>
10207
10208     <div class="entry">
10209       <div class="title">
10210         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html">KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?</a>
10211       </div>
10212       <div class="date">
10213          1st June 2010
10214       </div>
10215       <div class="body">
10216         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
10217 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
10218 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
10219 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
10220 wait.</p>
10221
10222 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
10223 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
10224 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
10225 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
10226 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
10227 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
10228
10229 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
10230 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
10231 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
10232 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
10233 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
10234 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
10235 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
10236 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
10237
10238 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
10239
10240       </div>
10241       <div class="tags">
10242
10243
10244         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10245
10246
10247       </div>
10248     </div>
10249     <div class="padding"></div>
10250
10251     <div class="entry">
10252       <div class="title">
10253         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html">Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing</a>
10254       </div>
10255       <div class="date">
10256         27th May 2010
10257       </div>
10258       <div class="body">
10259         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
10260 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
10261 issues are known and should be solved:
10262
10263 <p><ul>
10264
10265 <li>The wicd package seen to
10266 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
10267 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
10268 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
10269 seem to be on the case.</li>
10270
10271 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
10272 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
10273 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
10274 maintainer is on the case.</li>
10275
10276 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
10277 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
10278 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
10279 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
10280 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
10281 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
10282 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
10283 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
10284
10285 </ul></p>
10286
10287 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
10288 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
10289 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
10290 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
10291
10292 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
10293 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
10294 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
10295 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
10296
10297 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
10298
10299       </div>
10300       <div class="tags">
10301
10302
10303         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10304
10305
10306       </div>
10307     </div>
10308     <div class="padding"></div>
10309
10310     <div class="entry">
10311       <div class="title">
10312         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
10313       </div>
10314       <div class="date">
10315         22nd May 2010
10316       </div>
10317       <div class="body">
10318         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
10319 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
10320 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
10321 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
10322
10323 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
10324 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
10325 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
10326 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
10327 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
10328 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
10329 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
10330 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
10331 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
10332 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
10333 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
10334 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
10335 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
10336 going to work.</p>
10337
10338 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
10339 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
10340 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
10341 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
10342 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
10343 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
10344 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
10345 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
10346 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
10347 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
10348 Edu.</p>
10349
10350 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
10351 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
10352 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
10353 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
10354 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
10355 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
10356
10357 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
10358 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
10359
10360       </div>
10361       <div class="tags">
10362
10363
10364         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10365
10366
10367       </div>
10368     </div>
10369     <div class="padding"></div>
10370
10371     <div class="entry">
10372       <div class="title">
10373         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html">Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable</a>
10374       </div>
10375       <div class="date">
10376         14th May 2010
10377       </div>
10378       <div class="body">
10379         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
10380 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
10381 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
10382 expected, if I am to believe the
10383 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
10384 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
10385 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
10386 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
10387 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
10388 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
10389 version.</p>
10390
10391 More information about
10392 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
10393 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
10394 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
10395 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
10396
10397 <blockquote><pre>
10398 CONCURRENCY=none
10399 </pre></blockquote>
10400
10401 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
10402 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
10403 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
10404 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
10405
10406       </div>
10407       <div class="tags">
10408
10409
10410         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10411
10412
10413       </div>
10414     </div>
10415     <div class="padding"></div>
10416
10417     <div class="entry">
10418       <div class="title">
10419         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients</a>
10420       </div>
10421       <div class="date">
10422         14th May 2010
10423       </div>
10424       <div class="body">
10425         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
10426 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
10427 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
10428 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
10429 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
10430 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
10431 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
10432 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
10433
10434 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
10435 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
10436 this on the collector host:</p>
10437
10438 <blockquote><pre>
10439 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
10440 </pre></blockquote>
10441
10442 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
10443 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
10444
10445 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
10446 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
10447 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
10448 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
10449 written yet.</p>
10450
10451       </div>
10452       <div class="tags">
10453
10454
10455         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
10456
10457
10458       </div>
10459     </div>
10460     <div class="padding"></div>
10461
10462     <div class="entry">
10463       <div class="title">
10464         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
10465       </div>
10466       <div class="date">
10467         13th May 2010
10468       </div>
10469       <div class="body">
10470         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
10471 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
10472 has been
10473 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
10474
10475 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
10476 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
10477 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
10478 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
10479 based boot system.  Tollef is
10480 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
10481 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
10482 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
10483 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
10484 at the moment do not.</p>
10485
10486 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
10487 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
10488 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
10489 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
10490 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
10491 way forward.</p>
10492
10493 <p>In the mean time, based on the
10494 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
10495 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
10496 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
10497 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
10498 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
10499 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
10500 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
10501 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
10502
10503       </div>
10504       <div class="tags">
10505
10506
10507         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
10508
10509
10510       </div>
10511     </div>
10512     <div class="padding"></div>
10513
10514     <div class="entry">
10515       <div class="title">
10516         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html">Parallellizing the boot in Debian Squeeze - ready for wider testing</a>
10517       </div>
10518       <div class="date">
10519          6th May 2010
10520       </div>
10521       <div class="body">
10522         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
10523 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
10524 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
10525 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
10526 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
10527 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
10528 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
10529
10530 <blockquote><pre>
10531 CONCURRENCY=makefile
10532 </pre></blockquote>
10533
10534 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
10535 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
10536 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
10537 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
10538 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
10539 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
10540 make this happen.</p>
10541
10542 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
10543 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
10544 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
10545 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
10546 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
10547
10548 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
10549 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
10550 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
10551 fix the remaining issues.</p>
10552
10553 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
10554 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
10555 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
10556 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
10557
10558       </div>
10559       <div class="tags">
10560
10561
10562         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10563
10564
10565       </div>
10566     </div>
10567     <div class="padding"></div>
10568
10569     <div class="entry">
10570       <div class="title">
10571         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html">Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing</a>
10572       </div>
10573       <div class="date">
10574         27th July 2009
10575       </div>
10576       <div class="body">
10577         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
10578 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
10579 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
10580 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
10581 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
10582 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
10583 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
10584
10585 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
10586 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
10587 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
10588
10589       </div>
10590       <div class="tags">
10591
10592
10593         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
10594
10595
10596       </div>
10597     </div>
10598     <div class="padding"></div>
10599
10600     <div class="entry">
10601       <div class="title">
10602         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
10603       </div>
10604       <div class="date">
10605         22nd July 2009
10606       </div>
10607       <div class="body">
10608         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
10609 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
10610 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
10611 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
10612 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
10613 the package up to date.</p>
10614
10615 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
10616 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
10617 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
10618 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
10619 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
10620 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
10621 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
10622 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
10623 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
10624 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
10625 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
10626 working on the future release.</p>
10627
10628 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
10629 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
10630
10631       </div>
10632       <div class="tags">
10633
10634
10635         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
10636
10637
10638       </div>
10639     </div>
10640     <div class="padding"></div>
10641
10642     <div class="entry">
10643       <div class="title">
10644         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
10645       </div>
10646       <div class="date">
10647         24th June 2009
10648       </div>
10649       <div class="body">
10650         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
10651 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
10652 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
10653 funded
10654 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
10655 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
10656 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
10657 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
10658 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
10659 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
10660
10661 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
10662 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
10663 boot:</p>
10664
10665 <ul>
10666
10667 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
10668
10669 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
10670    clock is in UTC.</li>
10671
10672 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
10673    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
10674    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
10675
10676 </ul>
10677
10678 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
10679 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
10680 Villegas</a>.
10681
10682 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
10683 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
10684 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
10685 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
10686 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
10687 using this.</p>
10688
10689 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
10690 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
10691 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
10692 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
10693 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
10694 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
10695 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
10696
10697       </div>
10698       <div class="tags">
10699
10700
10701         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10702
10703
10704       </div>
10705     </div>
10706     <div class="padding"></div>
10707
10708     <div class="entry">
10709       <div class="title">
10710         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/BSAs_p_stander_om_piratkopiering_m_ter_motstand.html">BSAs påstander om piratkopiering møter motstand</a>
10711       </div>
10712       <div class="date">
10713         17th May 2009
10714       </div>
10715       <div class="body">
10716         <p>Hvert år de siste årene har BSA, lobbyfronten til de store
10717 programvareselskapene som Microsoft og Apple, publisert en rapport der
10718 de gjetter på hvor mye piratkopiering påfører i tapte inntekter i
10719 ulike land rundt om i verden.  Resultatene er tendensiøse.  For noen
10720 dager siden kom
10721 <a href="http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/studies/globalpiracy2008.pdf">siste
10722 rapport</a>, og det er flere kritiske kommentarer publisert de siste
10723 dagene.  Et spesielt interessant kommentar fra Sverige,
10724 <a href="http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.229795/bsa-hoftade-sverigesiffror">BSA
10725 höftade Sverigesiffror</a>, oppsummeres slik:</p>
10726
10727 <blockquote>
10728 I sin senaste rapport slår BSA fast att 25 procent av all mjukvara i
10729 Sverige är piratkopierad. Det utan att ha pratat med ett enda svenskt
10730 företag. "Man bör nog kanske inte se de här siffrorna som helt
10731 exakta", säger BSAs Sverigechef John Hugosson.
10732 </blockquote>
10733
10734 <p>Mon tro om de er like metodiske når de gjetter på andelen piratkopiering i Norge?  To andre kommentarer er <a
10735 href="http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/comment/2242134/bsa-piracy-figures-shot-reality">BSA
10736 piracy figures need a shot of reality</a> og <a
10737 href="http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3958/125/">Does The WIPO
10738 Copyright Treaty Work?</a></p>
10739
10740 <p>Fant lenkene via <a
10741 href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/17/1632242">oppslag
10742 på Slashdot</a>.</p>
10743
10744       </div>
10745       <div class="tags">
10746
10747
10748         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
10749
10750
10751       </div>
10752     </div>
10753     <div class="padding"></div>
10754
10755     <div class="entry">
10756       <div class="title">
10757         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IDG_mener_linux_i_servermarkedet_vil_vokse_med_21__i_2009.html">IDG mener linux i servermarkedet vil vokse med 21% i 2009</a>
10758       </div>
10759       <div class="date">
10760          7th May 2009
10761       </div>
10762       <div class="body">
10763         <p>Kom over
10764 <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10216873-16.html">interessante
10765 tall</a> fra IDG om utviklingen av linuxservermarkedet.  Fikk meg til
10766 å tenke på antall tjenermaskiner ved Universitetet i Oslo der jeg
10767 jobber til daglig.  En rask opptelling forteller meg at vi har 490
10768 (61%) fysiske unix-tjener (mest linux men også noen solaris) og 196
10769 (25%) windowstjenere, samt 112 (14%) virtuelle unix-tjenere.  Med den
10770 bakgrunnskunnskapen kan jeg godt tro at IDG er inne på noe.</p>
10771
10772       </div>
10773       <div class="tags">
10774
10775
10776         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
10777
10778
10779       </div>
10780     </div>
10781     <div class="padding"></div>
10782
10783     <div class="entry">
10784       <div class="title">
10785         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kryptert_harddisk___naturligvis.html">Kryptert harddisk - naturligvis</a>
10786       </div>
10787       <div class="date">
10788          2nd May 2009
10789       </div>
10790       <div class="body">
10791         <p><a href="http://www.dagensit.no/trender/article1658676.ece">Dagens
10792 IT melder</a> at Intel hevder at det er dyrt å miste en datamaskin,
10793 når en tar tap av arbeidstid, fortrolige dokumenter,
10794 personopplysninger og alt annet det innebærer.  Det er ingen tvil om
10795 at det er en kostbar affære å miste sin datamaskin, og det er årsaken
10796 til at jeg har kryptert harddisken på både kontormaskinen og min
10797 bærbare.  Begge inneholder personopplysninger jeg ikke ønsker skal
10798 komme på avveie, den første informasjon relatert til jobben min ved
10799 Universitetet i Oslo, og den andre relatert til blant annet
10800 foreningsarbeide.  Kryptering av diskene gjør at det er lite
10801 sannsynlig at dophoder som kan finne på å rappe maskinene får noe ut
10802 av dem.  Maskinene låses automatisk etter noen minutter uten bruk,
10803 og en reboot vil gjøre at de ber om passord før de vil starte opp.
10804 Jeg bruker Debian på begge maskinene, og installasjonssystemet der
10805 gjør det trivielt å sette opp krypterte disker.  Jeg har LVM på toppen
10806 av krypterte partisjoner, slik at alt av datapartisjoner er kryptert.
10807 Jeg anbefaler alle å kryptere diskene på sine bærbare.  Kostnaden når
10808 det er gjort slik jeg gjør det er minimale, og gevinstene er
10809 betydelige.  En bør dog passe på passordet.  Hvis det går tapt, må
10810 maskinen reinstalleres og alt er tapt.</p>
10811
10812 <p>Krypteringen vil ikke stoppe kompetente angripere som f.eks. kjøler
10813 ned minnebrikkene før maskinen rebootes med programvare for å hente ut
10814 krypteringsnøklene.  Kostnaden med å forsvare seg mot slike angripere
10815 er for min del høyere enn gevinsten.  Jeg tror oddsene for at
10816 f.eks. etteretningsorganisasjoner har glede av å titte på mine
10817 maskiner er minimale, og ulempene jeg ville oppnå ved å forsøke å
10818 gjøre det vanskeligere for angripere med kompetanse og ressurser er
10819 betydelige.</p>
10820
10821       </div>
10822       <div class="tags">
10823
10824
10825         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
10826
10827
10828       </div>
10829     </div>
10830     <div class="padding"></div>
10831
10832     <div class="entry">
10833       <div class="title">
10834         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html">Two projects that have improved the quality of free software a lot</a>
10835       </div>
10836       <div class="date">
10837          2nd May 2009
10838       </div>
10839       <div class="body">
10840         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
10841 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
10842 do not yet know them.</p>
10843
10844 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
10845 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
10846 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
10847 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
10848 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
10849 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
10850 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
10851 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
10852 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
10853 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
10854 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
10855
10856 <p>The second one is
10857 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
10858 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
10859 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
10860 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
10861 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
10862 and the company behind it is running
10863 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
10864 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
10865 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
10866 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
10867 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
10868 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
10869 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
10870 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
10871
10872 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
10873 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
10874 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
10875 surrounded by today.</p>
10876
10877       </div>
10878       <div class="tags">
10879
10880
10881         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10882
10883
10884       </div>
10885     </div>
10886     <div class="padding"></div>
10887
10888     <div class="entry">
10889       <div class="title">
10890         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html">No patch is not better than a useless patch</a>
10891       </div>
10892       <div class="date">
10893         28th April 2009
10894       </div>
10895       <div class="body">
10896         <p>Julien Blache
10897 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
10898 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
10899 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
10900 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
10901 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
10902 properties.</p>
10903
10904       </div>
10905       <div class="tags">
10906
10907
10908         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
10909
10910
10911       </div>
10912     </div>
10913     <div class="padding"></div>
10914
10915     <div class="entry">
10916       <div class="title">
10917         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html">Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</a>
10918       </div>
10919       <div class="date">
10920         30th March 2009
10921       </div>
10922       <div class="body">
10923         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
10924 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
10925 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
10926 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
10927 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
10928 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
10929 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
10930 application.</p>
10931
10932 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
10933 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
10934 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
10935 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
10936 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
10937 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
10938 blocked from doing so.</p>
10939
10940 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
10941 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
10942 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
10943 requirements change.</p>
10944
10945 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
10946 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
10947 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
10948
10949       </div>
10950       <div class="tags">
10951
10952
10953         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
10954
10955
10956       </div>
10957     </div>
10958     <div class="padding"></div>
10959
10960     <div class="entry">
10961       <div class="title">
10962         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
10963       </div>
10964       <div class="date">
10965         29th March 2009
10966       </div>
10967       <div class="body">
10968         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
10969 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
10970 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
10971 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
10972 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
10973 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
10974 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
10975 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
10976 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
10977 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
10978 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
10979 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
10980 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
10981 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
10982 now. :)</p>
10983
10984       </div>
10985       <div class="tags">
10986
10987
10988         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
10989
10990
10991       </div>
10992     </div>
10993     <div class="padding"></div>
10994
10995     <div class="entry">
10996       <div class="title">
10997         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">Time for new  LDAP schemas replacing RFC 2307?</a>
10998       </div>
10999       <div class="date">
11000         29th March 2009
11001       </div>
11002       <div class="body">
11003         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
11004 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
11005 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
11006 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
11007 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
11008 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
11009
11010 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
11011 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
11012 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
11013 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
11014 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
11015 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
11016 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
11017 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
11018 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
11019 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
11020 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
11021 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
11022 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
11023
11024 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
11025 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
11026 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
11027 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
11028
11029 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
11030 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
11031
11032 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
11033 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
11034 new IETF work group?</p>
11035
11036       </div>
11037       <div class="tags">
11038
11039
11040         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11041
11042
11043       </div>
11044     </div>
11045     <div class="padding"></div>
11046
11047     <div class="entry">
11048       <div class="title">
11049         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html">Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut</a>
11050       </div>
11051       <div class="date">
11052         15th February 2009
11053       </div>
11054       <div class="body">
11055         <p>Endelig er <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>
11056 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214">Lenny</a> gitt ut.
11057 Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye
11058 programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den
11059 stabile utgaven av Debian.  Neste steg er nå å få
11060 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> /
11061 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> ferdig
11062 oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan
11063 slippes løs på skolene.  Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har
11064 gjort dette mulig.  Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt
11065 bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken
11066 <tt>insserv</tt>.</p>
11067
11068       </div>
11069       <div class="tags">
11070
11071
11072         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
11073
11074
11075       </div>
11076     </div>
11077     <div class="padding"></div>
11078
11079     <div class="entry">
11080       <div class="title">
11081         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html">Devcamp brought us closer to the Lenny based Debian Edu release</a>
11082       </div>
11083       <div class="date">
11084          7th December 2008
11085       </div>
11086       <div class="body">
11087         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
11088 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
11089 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
11090 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
11091 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
11092 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
11093 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
11094 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
11095
11096 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
11097 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
11098 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
11099 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
11100 of these cards.</p>
11101
11102       </div>
11103       <div class="tags">
11104
11105
11106         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp</a>.
11107
11108
11109       </div>
11110     </div>
11111     <div class="padding"></div>
11112
11113     <div class="entry">
11114       <div class="title">
11115         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html">The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian</a>
11116       </div>
11117       <div class="date">
11118         25th November 2008
11119       </div>
11120       <div class="body">
11121         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
11122 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
11123 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
11124 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
11125 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
11126 notes are available on
11127 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
11128 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
11129 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
11130 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
11131 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
11132 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
11133 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
11134 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
11135 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
11136
11137 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
11138 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
11139
11140       </div>
11141       <div class="tags">
11142
11143
11144         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
11145
11146
11147       </div>
11148     </div>
11149     <div class="padding"></div>
11150
11151     <p style="text-align: right;"><a href="debian.rss"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/xml.gif" alt="RSS Feed" width="36" height="14" /></a></p>
11152     <div id="sidebar">
11153
11154
11155
11156 <h2>Archive</h2>
11157 <ul>
11158
11159 <li>2016
11160 <ul>
11161
11162 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/01/">January (3)</a></li>
11163
11164 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/02/">February (2)</a></li>
11165
11166 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/03/">March (3)</a></li>
11167
11168 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/04/">April (8)</a></li>
11169
11170 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/05/">May (8)</a></li>
11171
11172 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/06/">June (2)</a></li>
11173
11174 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/07/">July (2)</a></li>
11175
11176 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/08/">August (5)</a></li>
11177
11178 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/09/">September (2)</a></li>
11179
11180 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/10/">October (1)</a></li>
11181
11182 </ul></li>
11183
11184 <li>2015
11185 <ul>
11186
11187 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
11188
11189 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
11190
11191 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
11192
11193 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
11194
11195 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (3)</a></li>
11196
11197 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/06/">June (4)</a></li>
11198
11199 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/07/">July (6)</a></li>
11200
11201 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/08/">August (2)</a></li>
11202
11203 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/09/">September (2)</a></li>
11204
11205 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/10/">October (9)</a></li>
11206
11207 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/11/">November (6)</a></li>
11208
11209 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/12/">December (3)</a></li>
11210
11211 </ul></li>
11212
11213 <li>2014
11214 <ul>
11215
11216 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
11217
11218 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
11219
11220 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
11221
11222 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
11223
11224 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
11225
11226 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
11227
11228 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
11229
11230 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
11231
11232 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
11233
11234 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
11235
11236 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
11237
11238 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
11239
11240 </ul></li>
11241
11242 <li>2013
11243 <ul>
11244
11245 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
11246
11247 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
11248
11249 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
11250
11251 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
11252
11253 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
11254
11255 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
11256
11257 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
11258
11259 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
11260
11261 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
11262
11263 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
11264
11265 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
11266
11267 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
11268
11269 </ul></li>
11270
11271 <li>2012
11272 <ul>
11273
11274 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
11275
11276 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
11277
11278 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
11279
11280 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
11281
11282 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
11283
11284 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
11285
11286 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
11287
11288 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
11289
11290 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
11291
11292 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
11293
11294 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
11295
11296 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
11297
11298 </ul></li>
11299
11300 <li>2011
11301 <ul>
11302
11303 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
11304
11305 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
11306
11307 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
11308
11309 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
11310
11311 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
11312
11313 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
11314
11315 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
11316
11317 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
11318
11319 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
11320
11321 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
11322
11323 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
11324
11325 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
11326
11327 </ul></li>
11328
11329 <li>2010
11330 <ul>
11331
11332 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
11333
11334 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
11335
11336 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
11337
11338 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
11339
11340 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
11341
11342 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
11343
11344 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
11345
11346 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
11347
11348 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
11349
11350 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
11351
11352 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
11353
11354 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
11355
11356 </ul></li>
11357
11358 <li>2009
11359 <ul>
11360
11361 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
11362
11363 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
11364
11365 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
11366
11367 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
11368
11369 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
11370
11371 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
11372
11373 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
11374
11375 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
11376
11377 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
11378
11379 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
11380
11381 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
11382
11383 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
11384
11385 </ul></li>
11386
11387 <li>2008
11388 <ul>
11389
11390 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
11391
11392 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
11393
11394 </ul></li>
11395
11396 </ul>
11397
11398
11399
11400 <h2>Tags</h2>
11401 <ul>
11402
11403  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (13)</a></li>
11404
11405  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
11406
11407  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
11408
11409  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
11410
11411  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (9)</a></li>
11412
11413  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (16)</a></li>
11414
11415  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
11416
11417  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
11418
11419  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (136)</a></li>
11420
11421  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (157)</a></li>
11422
11423  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
11424
11425  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (15)</a></li>
11426
11427  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (23)</a></li>
11428
11429  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
11430
11431  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (328)</a></li>
11432
11433  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
11434
11435  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (12)</a></li>
11436
11437  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (28)</a></li>
11438
11439  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
11440
11441  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (18)</a></li>
11442
11443  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264 (20)</a></li>
11444
11445  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (42)</a></li>
11446
11447  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (13)</a></li>
11448
11449  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (19)</a></li>
11450
11451  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
11452
11453  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
11454
11455  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
11456
11457  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
11458
11459  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
11460
11461  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (39)</a></li>
11462
11463  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software (8)</a></li>
11464
11465  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (278)</a></li>
11466
11467  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (182)</a></li>
11468
11469  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (26)</a></li>
11470
11471  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
11472
11473  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (61)</a></li>
11474
11475  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (92)</a></li>
11476
11477  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (1)</a></li>
11478
11479  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
11480
11481  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
11482
11483  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
11484
11485  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (9)</a></li>
11486
11487  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
11488
11489  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (4)</a></li>
11490
11491  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
11492
11493  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (48)</a></li>
11494
11495  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
11496
11497  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (5)</a></li>
11498
11499  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (49)</a></li>
11500
11501  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (4)</a></li>
11502
11503  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (10)</a></li>
11504
11505  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (39)</a></li>
11506
11507  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (2)</a></li>
11508
11509  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
11510
11511  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (8)</a></li>
11512
11513  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (59)</a></li>
11514
11515  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
11516
11517  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (38)</a></li>
11518
11519 </ul>
11520
11521
11522     </div>
11523     <p style="text-align: right">
11524  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
11525 </p>
11526
11527   </body>
11528 </html>