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        <channel>
                <title>Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries tagged english</title>
                <description>Entries tagged english</description>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>

        
        <item>
                <title>Free Culture in Norwegian - 5 chapters done, 74 percent left to do</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 21 Jul 2012 20:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I reported earlier that I am working on
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html&quot;&gt;a
norwegian version&lt;/a&gt; of the book
&lt;a href=&quot;http://free-culture.cc/&quot;&gt;Free Culture&lt;/a&gt; by Lawrence Lessig.
Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six.  The source files as well as a
PDF and EPUB version of this book is available from
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig&quot;&gt;github&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
(preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
completely translated.  This completes 26 percent of the number of
strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus 74
percent left to translate.  A graph of the progress is present at the
bottom of the github project page.  There is still room for more
contributors.  Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
you got time and am willing to help make this book make it to
print. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
translations, if you want the book to be available in your
language.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
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        <item>
                <title>Call for help from docbook expert to tag Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Call_for_help_from_docbook_expert_to_tag_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Call_for_help_from_docbook_expert_to_tag_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 16 Jul 2012 22:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I am currently working on a
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html&quot;&gt;project
to translate&lt;/a&gt; the book
&lt;a href=&quot;http://free-culture.cc/&quot;&gt;Free Culture&lt;/a&gt; by Lawrence Lessig
to Norwegian.  And the source we base our translation on is the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook&quot;&gt;docbook&lt;/a&gt; version, to
allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
tagged.  The source files of this project is available from
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig&quot;&gt;github&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert.  Is there a
docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book?  This will provide a
well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
easier for us to create a good Norwegian version.  If you can and want
to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
send pull requests with fixes. :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
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        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 9 Jul 2012 00:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu /
Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; project have users all over the globe, but until
recently we have not known about any users in Norway&#39;s neighbour
country Sweden.  This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
to adjust and scale the just released
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html&quot;&gt;Debian Edu
Wheezy&lt;/a&gt; setup to his liking.  He granted me an interview, and I am
happy to share his answers with you here.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who are you, and how do you spend your days?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
&quot;folkhighschool&quot; teacher, that is, for teaching grownups.  In
Norwegian I believe it&#39;s called &quot;Vuxenupplaring&quot;. I also have a master
in &quot;Technology and social change&quot;. So I&#39;m not really a tech guy, I
just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
perspective when working with IT.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
seriously into Skolelinux instead.

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
same. In our VNC-based solution you had to &quot;beat around the bush&quot; by
setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time.  Our
old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit &quot;oldish&quot; applications. Debian is
quicker to update.

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
sound from working with them.  It&#39;s a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
install time.  In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
support for single-sign on.  That will make the transition to free
software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
need.  No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
some applications can&#39;t be open source. As for us we really need to
run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes.  We run a journalist
education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association).  Our
education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
are done.  This is important if you want to get a job.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
magazines.  We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
market to Adobe. The only &quot;equivalent&quot; to InDesign in the opensource
world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
edit and compile a newspaper.  But politically at our school we are not
there yet.  And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise.  Those
things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
sound file.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
will try.  The problem is the students have certain expectations when
they start an education towards a profession.  So the programs has to
look and feel professional.  Good thing with radio, there are many
programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which free software do you use daily?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Myself I&#39;m running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days.  I use almost
only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
it&#39;s also very important that the multimedia support is working
flawlessly.  The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
idea. It&#39;s also important that the open source software works even for
the administration.  It&#39;s hard to convince the teachers to stick with
open source, if the principal has to run Windows.  It also creates a
problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
will create a difference in &quot;status&quot; between classes, so a good
support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
desktop is essential.  At least at our school, where we have mixed
level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
article &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/&quot;&gt;Radio station
management with Airtime&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/&quot;&gt;Airtime&lt;/a&gt; which
claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rivendellaudio.org/&quot;&gt;Rivendell&lt;/a&gt; which claim to
be complete radio broadcast automation solution.  All of them seem
useful to the aspiring radio producer.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
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        <item>
                <title>Why do schools waste money on IT?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 8 Jul 2012 09:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
in schools and municipalities.  We provide what the happy users of
Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution.  I
was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
Steinberg in his blog post
&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mysociety.org/2012/06/19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/&quot;&gt;Can
you recognize the million pound chair?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.  Read it and weep for the
spending of your tax money.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
purchases.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
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        <item>
                <title>Free Timetabling Software - nice free software</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 7 Jul 2012 09:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Included in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu /
Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; is a large collection of end user and school specific
software.  It is one of the packages not installed by default but
provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
receive.  The software is

&lt;a href=&quot;http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/&quot;&gt;named FET&lt;/a&gt;, and it provide a
graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
both teachers and students.  It is available both for
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html&quot;&gt;Linux, MacOSX and
Windows&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html&quot;&gt;the
feature list&lt;/a&gt;, liftet from the project web site:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;

  &lt;li&gt;FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
    You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it &lt;/li&gt;
        
  &lt;li&gt;Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
    (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
    (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
    (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
    (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
    (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
    sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
    (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
    &lt;/li&gt;
        
  &lt;li&gt;Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
    semi-automatic or manual allocation&lt;/li&gt;
        
  &lt;li&gt;Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
    GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports &lt;/li&gt;
        
  &lt;li&gt;Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
    with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)&lt;/li&gt;
        
  &lt;li&gt;Import/export from CSV format&lt;/li&gt;
        
  &lt;li&gt;The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
    formats &lt;/li&gt;
        
  &lt;li&gt;Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
    and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
    non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
    (as separate sets)&lt;/li&gt;
        
  &lt;li&gt;Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
    (but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
    percentage)&lt;/li&gt;
        
  &lt;li&gt;Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
    demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
    memory):
    &lt;ul&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;Maximum number of working days per week: 35&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;Maximum total number of teachers: 6000&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;Maximum total number of subjects: 6000&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;Virtually unlimited number of activity tags&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;Maximum number of activities: 30000&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;Maximum number of rooms: 6000&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;Maximum number of buildings: 6000&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
          students sets for each activity.  (it is possible
          also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
          activity)&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;Virtually unlimited number of time constraints&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;Virtually unlimited number of space constraints&lt;/li&gt;
    &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;

  &lt;li&gt;A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
    &lt;ul&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;Break periods&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;For teacher(s):
        &lt;ul&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Not available periods&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Max/min days per week&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Max gaps per day/week&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Max hours daily/continuously&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Min hours daily&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag&lt;/li&gt;

          &lt;li&gt;Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
            days per week&lt;/li&gt;
        &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;For students (sets):
        &lt;ul&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Not available periods&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Max gaps per day/week&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Max hours daily/continuously&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Min hours daily&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag&lt;/li&gt;

          &lt;li&gt;Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
            days per week&lt;/li&gt;
        &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
        &lt;ul&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;A single preferred starting time&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;A set of preferred starting times&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;A set of preferred time slots&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Min/max days between them&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;End(s) students day&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Same starting time/day/hour&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
            flexible constraint, useful in many situations)&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Not overlapping&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Max simultaneous in selected time slots&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities&lt;/li&gt;
        &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
    &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;

  &lt;li&gt;A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
    &lt;ul&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;Room not available periods&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;For teacher(s):
        &lt;ul&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Home room(s)&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Max building changes per day/week&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Min gaps between building changes&lt;/li&gt;
        &lt;/ul&gt;
      &lt;/li&gt;
                
      &lt;li&gt;For students (sets):
        &lt;ul&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Home room(s)&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Max building changes per day/week&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Min gaps between building changes&lt;/li&gt;
        &lt;/ul&gt;
      &lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;Preferred room(s):
        &lt;ul&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;For a subject&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;For an activity tag&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;For a subject and an activity tag&lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Individually for a (sub)activity&lt;/li&gt;
        &lt;/ul&gt;
      &lt;/li&gt;

      &lt;li&gt;For a set of activities:
        &lt;ul&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;Occupy a maximum number of different rooms&lt;/li&gt;
        &lt;/ul&gt;
      &lt;/li&gt;
    &lt;/ul&gt;
  &lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it.  If you
need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
manually, check it out. 

A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
&lt;a href=&quot;http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/2012/03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/&quot;&gt;a
blog post from MarvelSoft&lt;/a&gt;.  If you find FET useful, please provide
a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos&quot;&gt;Debian Edu HowTo
section&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
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                <title>Can Zimbra be told to send autoreplies to the From: address?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Can_Zimbra_be_told_to_send_autoreplies_to_the_From__address_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Can_Zimbra_be_told_to_send_autoreplies_to_the_From__address_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 3 Jul 2012 23:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;In the NUUG &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fiksgatami.no/&quot;&gt;FiksGataMi&lt;/a&gt;
project (Norwegian version of
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fixmystreet.com/&quot;&gt;FixMyStreet&lt;/a&gt; from
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mysociety.org/&quot;&gt;mySociety&lt;/a&gt;), we have discovered
a problem with the municipalities using
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zimbra.com/&quot;&gt;Zimbra&lt;/a&gt;.  When FiksGataMi send a
problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
is set to the FiksGataMi contact address.  The intention is to make
sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
Zimbra.  Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
the From: header.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
problem.  We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports.  We have been in
contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
to the specification in RFC 3834, which recommend that vacation
messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
differently.  Anyone know?  Please let us know at
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami&quot;&gt;fiksgatami
(at) nuug.no&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu interview: José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jos__Luis_Redrejo_Rodr_guez.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jos__Luis_Redrejo_Rodr_guez.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 26 Jun 2012 08:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I&#39;ve been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
another interview with the people behind
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu and Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;.
This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
helpers from Spain.  His effort was the reason we added support for
several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html&quot;&gt;Debian Edu
Squeeze&lt;/a&gt; version.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who are you, and how do you spend your days?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
ICT in schools&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
been used everyday inside Debian Edu.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
economical and technical resources in the different countries don&#39;t
allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
technologies in school.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which free software do you use daily?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
between Iceweasel, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.geany.org/&quot;&gt;Geany&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator&quot;&gt;Terminator&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
universities. So different strategies are needed.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
we&#39;ve done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
using wireless. I think we&#39;ll see more and more personal devices in
the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
working there.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Song book for Computer Scientists</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 24 Jun 2012 13:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uit.no/&quot;&gt;University of Tromsø&lt;/a&gt;, I started
collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
put it up on some public version control repository where others can
help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
missing in my book.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
Especially now that &lt;a href=&quot;http://debconf12.debconf.org/&quot;&gt;Debconf
12&lt;/a&gt; is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
out &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/&quot;&gt;Petter&#39;s
Computer Science Songbook&lt;/a&gt;.
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu - some ideas for the future versions</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___some_ideas_for_the_future_versions.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___some_ideas_for_the_future_versions.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 11 Jun 2012 14:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;During my work on
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.nb.html&quot;&gt;Debian Edu
based on Squeeze&lt;/a&gt;, I came across some issues that should be
addressed in the Wheezy release.  I finally found time to wrap up my
notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
explanation.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
system depend on tasksel tasks in
/usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
installation.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Enable Kerberos login for more services.  Now with the Kerberos
foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions.  We should
at least try to enable it for these services:
&lt;ul&gt;

  &lt;li&gt;CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
    quotas.&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Nagios for admins checking the system status.&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;LDAP for admins updating LDAP.&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install.  The split made
sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
touching the disk if the disk is too small.  This is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/653305&quot;&gt;BTS report #653305&lt;/a&gt; and the
d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
it and upload.  After this is done we need to adjust
debian-edu-install to use this new hook.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
time config).  LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
in Wheezy.

&lt;li&gt;Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
up KDE login on slow networks.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
change on first login.  This is useful when handing out password on
paper, to make sure only the user know the password.  This require
fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
familiar with GUIs.  This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
have it available where the admin will be looking for it..&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses).  None of the
Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
when changing password using the Kerberos protocol.  The hook was
requested in &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/588968&quot;&gt;BTS report
#588968&lt;/a&gt; and is now available in Wheezy.  We might need to write a
MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;reduce the number of chemistry visualisers&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;consider dropping xpaint&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;and probably more?&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Some hardware need external firmware to work properly.  This is
mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
examples too.  For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
some GUI to do this.  Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
could consider using their packages.  At the moment we have some
command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
for the LTSP chroot).&lt;/li&gt;


&lt;li&gt;In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options.  We
should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
use.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
interesting educational packages.  We should work on the package
tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
new applications with a simple mouse click.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled.  We should
implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
instead of the &quot;it is documented&quot; method of today.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
&quot;take over&quot; the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
There are at least three implementations,
&lt;a href=&quot;italc.sourceforge.net/&quot;&gt;italc&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.itais.net/help/en/&quot;&gt;controlaula&lt;/a&gt; og
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.epoptes.org/&quot;&gt;epoptes&lt;/a&gt; and we should pick one of
them and make it trivial to set it up in a school.  The challenges is
how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
given room.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
the Debian Edu network.  Not quite sure how.  Perhaps we should
provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
configuration and data with the central server.  This should be
investigated.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
version.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>TV with face recognition, for improved viewer experience</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/TV_with_face_recognition__for_improved_viewer_experience.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/TV_with_face_recognition__for_improved_viewer_experience.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 9 Jun 2012 22:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
&lt;a href=&quot;http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/12/06/09/0012247/intel-to-launch-tv-service-with-facial-recognition-by-end-of-the-year&quot;&gt;TV
with face recognition&lt;/a&gt; to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
recognition on the TV image itself.  It could let the viewer know who
is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
evaluate what is being said and done.  That would be a feature I would
be willing to pay for.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
&lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt&quot;&gt;1984 by George
Orwell&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Web service to look up HP and Dell computer hardware support status</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_service_to_look_up_HP_and_Dell_computer_hardware_support_status.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_service_to_look_up_HP_and_Dell_computer_hardware_support_status.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 6 Jun 2012 23:15:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;A few days ago
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html&quot;&gt;I
reported how to get&lt;/a&gt; the support status out of Dell using an
unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2012-February/045959.html&quot;&gt;discovered
by Daniel De Marco in february&lt;/a&gt;.  Combined with my web scraping
code for HP, Dell and IBM
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html&quot;&gt;from
2009&lt;/a&gt;, I got inspired and wrote
&lt;a href=&quot;https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/&quot;&gt;a
web service&lt;/a&gt; based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
support status and get a machine readable result back.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
output:

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
% GET &lt;a href=&quot;https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/?format=json&amp;vendor=Dell&amp;servicetag=2v1xwn1&quot;&gt;https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/?format=json&amp;vendor=Dell&amp;servicetag=2v1xwn1&lt;/a&gt;
supportstatus({&quot;servicetag&quot;: &quot;2v1xwn1&quot;, &quot;warrantyend&quot;: &quot;2013-11-24&quot;, &quot;shipped&quot;: &quot;2010-11-24&quot;, &quot;scrapestamputc&quot;: &quot;2012-06-06T20:26:56.965847&quot;, &quot;scrapedurl&quot;: &quot;http://143.166.84.118/services/assetservice.asmx?WSDL&quot;, &quot;vendor&quot;: &quot;Dell&quot;, &quot;productid&quot;: &quot;&quot;})
%
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
support for other vendors.  The python source is available on
Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 2 Jun 2012 15:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu and Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;
mailing list.  He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html&quot;&gt;Debian Edu
Squeeze&lt;/a&gt; version.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who are you, and how do you spend your days?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
(Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
by Angela).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
becoming an osteopath.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
introducing free software into schools. The project&#39;s name is
&quot;IT-Zukunft Schule&quot; (IT future for schools). The project links IT
skills with communication skills.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
&quot;IT-Zukunft Schule&quot; we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
people said.  From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
distributions that target being used for school networks.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
people.  People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
protection experts, other IT professionals.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;We came to two conclusions:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
whereas most of each school&#39;s requirements could mapped by a standard
IT solution.  The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
possible.  In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
point.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
of people into using IT and teaching with IT. &quot;IT-Zukunft Schule&quot;
tries to provide an approach for this.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school&#39;s IT
equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
spare time.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
non-existent until 2010/2011.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
avoidance do exist.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
and probably a gain for all.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
project communication, honest communication within the group of
developers, etc.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Every coin has two sides:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Technically: &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/311188&quot;&gt;BTS issue
#311188&lt;/a&gt;, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
contribute).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
there being rather disconnected from the development department of
Debian Edu / Skolelinux.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which free software do you use daily?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
is being integrated in Ubuntu&#39;s software center.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
whiteboard.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My favourite terminal emulator is KDE&#39;s Yakuake.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
enrol people.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>SOAP based webservice from Dell to check server support status</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 1 Jun 2012 15:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;A few years ago I wrote
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html&quot;&gt;how
to extract support status&lt;/a&gt; for your Dell and HP servers.  Recently
I have learned from colleges here at the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uio.no/&quot;&gt;University of Oslo&lt;/a&gt; that Dell have
made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service.  Given
the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
readable information about the support status.  This perl code
demonstrate how to do it:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
use strict;
use warnings;
use SOAP::Lite;
use Data::Dumper;
my $GUID = &#39;11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111&#39;;
my $App = &#39;test&#39;;
my $servicetag = $ARGV[0] or die &quot;Please supply a servicetag. $!\n&quot;;
my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
my $s = SOAP::Lite
    -&gt; uri(&#39;http://support.dell.com/WebServices/&#39;)
    -&gt; on_action( sub { join &#39;&#39;, @_ } )
    -&gt; proxy(&#39;http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx&#39;)
    ;
my $a = $s-&gt;GetAssetInformation(
    SOAP::Data-&gt;name(&#39;guid&#39;)-&gt;value($GUID)-&gt;type(&#39;&#39;),
    SOAP::Data-&gt;name(&#39;applicationName&#39;)-&gt;value($App)-&gt;type(&#39;&#39;),
    SOAP::Data-&gt;name(&#39;serviceTags&#39;)-&gt;value($servicetag)-&gt;type(&#39;&#39;),
);
print Dumper($a -&gt; result) ;
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The output can look like this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
$VAR1 = {
          &#39;Asset&#39; =&gt; {
                     &#39;Entitlements&#39; =&gt; {
                                       &#39;EntitlementData&#39; =&gt; [
                                                            {
                                                              &#39;EntitlementType&#39; =&gt; &#39;Expired&#39;,
                                                              &#39;EndDate&#39; =&gt; &#39;2009-07-29T00:00:00&#39;,
                                                              &#39;Provider&#39; =&gt; &#39;&#39;,
                                                              &#39;StartDate&#39; =&gt; &#39;2006-07-29T00:00:00&#39;,
                                                              &#39;DaysLeft&#39; =&gt; &#39;0&#39;
                                                            },
                                                            {
                                                              &#39;EntitlementType&#39; =&gt; &#39;Expired&#39;,
                                                              &#39;EndDate&#39; =&gt; &#39;2009-07-29T00:00:00&#39;,
                                                              &#39;Provider&#39; =&gt; &#39;&#39;,
                                                              &#39;StartDate&#39; =&gt; &#39;2006-07-29T00:00:00&#39;,
                                                              &#39;DaysLeft&#39; =&gt; &#39;0&#39;
                                                            },
                                                            {
                                                              &#39;EntitlementType&#39; =&gt; &#39;Expired&#39;,
                                                              &#39;EndDate&#39; =&gt; &#39;2007-07-29T00:00:00&#39;,
                                                              &#39;Provider&#39; =&gt; &#39;&#39;,
                                                              &#39;StartDate&#39; =&gt; &#39;2006-07-29T00:00:00&#39;,
                                                              &#39;DaysLeft&#39; =&gt; &#39;0&#39;
                                                            }
                                                          ]
                                     },
                     &#39;AssetHeaderData&#39; =&gt; {
                                          &#39;SystemModel&#39; =&gt; &#39;GX620&#39;,
                                          &#39;ServiceTag&#39; =&gt; &#39;8DSGD2J&#39;,
                                          &#39;SystemShipDate&#39; =&gt; &#39;2006-07-29T19:00:00-05:00&#39;,
                                          &#39;Buid&#39; =&gt; &#39;2323&#39;,
                                          &#39;Region&#39; =&gt; &#39;Europe&#39;,
                                          &#39;SystemID&#39; =&gt; &#39;PLX_GX620&#39;,
                                          &#39;SystemType&#39; =&gt; &#39;OptiPlex&#39;
                                        }
                   }
        };
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
service outside the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation&quot;&gt;inline
documentation&lt;/a&gt;, and according to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://iboyd.net/index.php/2012/02/14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/&quot;&gt;one
comment&lt;/a&gt; it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
scraping HTML pages. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service.  If
you know of one, drop me an email. :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>First monitor calibration using ColorHug</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 31 May 2012 22:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;A few days ago my color calibration gadget
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hughski.com/index.html&quot;&gt;ColorHug&lt;/a&gt; arrived in the
mail, and I&#39;ve had a few days to test it.  As all my machines are
running Debian Squeeze, where 
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html&quot;&gt;the
calibration software&lt;/a&gt; is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD.  This worked
just fine.  So far I have only done the quick calibration.  It was
slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
another day.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;After calibration, I get a
&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile&quot;&gt;ICC color
profile&lt;/a&gt; file that can be passed to programs understanding such
tools.  KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
monitor setups.  But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
monitor.  After searching a bit, I
&lt;a href=&quot;http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347896&quot;&gt;discovered&lt;/a&gt;
that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
and a simple&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
dispwin -d 1 profile.icc
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor.  The
result was a bit more pink than I expected.  I guess I picked the
wrong monitor type for the &quot;led&quot; monitor I got, but the result is good
enough for now.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 27 May 2012 17:15:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu and Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;
mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils.  His name was Ralf
Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
since then, helping to make sure the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html&quot;&gt;Debian Edu
Squeeze&lt;/a&gt; release became as good as it is..&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who are you, and how do you spend your days?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
Mathematics, and Computer Science (&quot;Informatik&quot;). During the past 12
years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
O- or A-level (&quot;Abitur&quot;).  For quite as long, I&#39;ve been taking care of
our computer network.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
(4 months).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
(&quot;Best Newcomer Distribution&quot;, also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
(Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others.  For more
than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
locally installed Skolelinux image.  As a consequence, I joined quite
a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
(Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
labs).  Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
administration costs tend towards zero.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;While Debian&#39;s stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
office packages or desktop environments.  These schools have the
option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
capacity to do so.  Another issue is that Debian release cycles
include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
i.e. harder to understand for novices.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which free software do you use daily?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;ol&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
people really &quot;own&quot; their hardware, to make them understand the
difference between proprietary software products, and free software
developing.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany&#39;s public schools
there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
licenses), so schools won&#39;t benefit from any savings here. This
privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
share among German Skolelinux schools.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
trained. In many cases, teachers&#39; software customs are respected by
decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Don&#39;t limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
shared world wide (school books e.g.).&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don&#39;t
need to know the &quot;ribbon menu&quot; in order to get employed.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials.  And
keep sending documents in ODF formats.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>The cost of ODF and OOXML</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 26 May 2012 18:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
government.  I just sent him an email to let him know that his
assumption are most likely wrong.  Sharing it here in case some of my
blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Hi.  I just noted your
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/does-microsoft-office-lock-in-cost-the-uk-government-500-million/index.htm&quot;&gt;http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/does-microsoft-office-lock-in-cost-the-uk-government-500-million/index.htm&lt;/a&gt;
comment:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&quot;They&#39;re all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
with the help of Google Translate I can&#39;t find any figures about the
savings of &quot;moving to a flexible two standard&quot; as claimed by the
Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let&#39;s take
it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust.&quot;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated.  I believe it is
the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
at the content.  In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver.  In
reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
of wasted effort.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
minutes converting to ODF. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;See
&lt;a href=&quot;http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php&quot;&gt;http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php&lt;/a&gt;
and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php&quot;&gt;http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php&lt;/a&gt;
for background information.  Norwegian only, sorry. :)&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>ColorHug - USB and free software based screen color calibration</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColorHug___USB_and_free_software_based_screen_color_calibration.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColorHug___USB_and_free_software_based_screen_color_calibration.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 18 May 2012 10:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;In january, I
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2012/01/17/colorhug-has-arrived/&quot;&gt;discovered
the ColorHug&lt;/a&gt;, a USB dongle from
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hughski.com/index.html&quot;&gt;Hughski&lt;/a&gt; to calibrate
the color on a computer screen.  The software required is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html&quot;&gt;included
in Debian&lt;/a&gt;, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
batch.  Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
opportunity to order.  Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
delivery.  I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
should go in the mail on monday. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
drivers. :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 13 May 2012 20:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
publish another interview with the people behind
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu and Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;.
This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
details get right before release.

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who are you, and how do you spend your days?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My name is Jürgen Leibner, I&#39;m 49 years old and living in
Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany.  I worked nearly 20 years as
certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
international company for machinery and equipment.  Since 2011 I&#39;m a
certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer.  From April this year
I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
home since 2006.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
computers in use. I answered: &quot;Yes&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
and with a lot of fun.  About one year later the school was connected
to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
building.  That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
costs for things like licence and software.  So I searched for a
school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
people nearby who founded &#39;skolelinux.de&#39;. It was the Skolelinux
prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school.  I
managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
Bielefeld in December of 2006.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;When I&#39;m looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
for me as today.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In the past there were advantages like:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;I don&#39;t need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
they had little money to spent for computers and software.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
cost.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
clients because of it&#39;s preconfigured overall concept of being a
infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
server&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
school.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
came up in this way:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
now.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
interfaces used in the past.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
different needs.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The documentation is usable and gets better every day.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
is sharing knowledge and minds.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
solved today by Debian Edu. &lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
whole municipality areas.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
politicians.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Technically there are no disadvantages I&#39;m aware of.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which free software do you use daily?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
need from the KDE environment.  On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
and the whole family.  I probably forgot something.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
countries and areas all over the world.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Cutting it short - and picking the right tool for the job</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cutting_it_short___and_picking_the_right_tool_for_the_job.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cutting_it_short___and_picking_the_right_tool_for_the_job.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 30 Apr 2012 23:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;!-- IMG_5869.JPG --&gt;
&lt;img src=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-1611.jpeg&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
But the last ones have not really been up to the task.  My last
cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
time, and cutting my head took forever.  And the one before that did
not work very well either.  We have looked for something better for a
while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
discovered that there are indeed better tools available.  But these
are not marketed and sold to &quot;regular consumers&quot;.  The hair saloons
can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
companies.  The models they sell, are very different from the ones
available from Elkjøp and Lefdal.  The main difference is their
efficiency.  It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40
minutes required by my impotent Braun.  The hairdresser I visited had
a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
producer.  But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The next step was to find somewhere to buy it.  This was not
straight forward.  The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
did not want to sell anything to me.  But searching for the model on
the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
around NOK 4000,-.  This was a bit much.  We kept searching and
finally found a Danish supplier
&lt;a href=&quot;http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html&quot;&gt;selling
it for around NOK 1800,-&lt;/a&gt;.  We ordered one, and it arrived a few
days ago.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The instructions said it had to charge for 8 hours when we started
to use it, so we left it charging over night.  Normally it will only
need one hour to charge.  The following evening we successfully tested
it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
cutter.  The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
toys.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>HTC One X - Your video?  What do you mean?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/HTC_One_X___Your_video___What_do_you_mean_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/HTC_One_X___Your_video___What_do_you_mean_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece&quot;&gt;an
article today&lt;/a&gt; published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.urke.com/eirik/&quot;&gt;Eirik Helland Urke&lt;/a&gt; reports
that the video editor application included with
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs&quot;&gt;HTC One
X&lt;/a&gt; have some quite surprising terms of use.  The article is mostly
based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/urke/status/194062269724897280&quot;&gt;Drøy
brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.&lt;/a&gt;&quot;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I quickly translated it to this English message:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
&quot;Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
commercially.  Although I can ONLY use them privately.&quot;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&#39;ve been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html&quot;&gt;discovered
with my Canon IXUS 130&lt;/a&gt;.  The HTC One X specification specifies that
the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
video.  AMR is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues&quot;&gt;Adaptive
Multi-Rate audio codec&lt;/a&gt; with patents which according to the
Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.voiceage.com/&quot;&gt;VoiceAge&lt;/a&gt;.  MP4 is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing&quot;&gt;MPEG4 with
H.264&lt;/a&gt;, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mpegla.com/&quot;&gt;MPEG-LA&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I know why I prefer
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition&quot;&gt;free and open
standards&lt;/a&gt; also for video.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 19 Apr 2012 22:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Here in Norway, the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=339&quot;&gt; Ministry of
Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs&lt;/a&gt; is behind
a &lt;a href=&quot;http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder&quot;&gt;directory of
standards&lt;/a&gt; that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
government.  When the directory was created, the people behind it made
an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
to the government.  Free software and non-free software could compete
on the same level.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;But recently, some standards with RAND
(&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing&quot;&gt;Reasonable
And Non-Discriminatory&lt;/a&gt;) terms have made their way into the
directory.  And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
implementing them.  The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
willing to pay will get a license.  Both sound great in theory.  In
practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user.  By
definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
And given that people will use the software without handing any money
to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
to implement a standard when the income available is zero.  The result
in these situations is that free software are locked out from
implementing standards with RAND terms.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory.  Because free
software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
in Norway.  The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
attention to these issues in the future.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
from Simon Phipps
(&lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/11/rand-not-so-reasonable/&quot;&gt;RAND:
Not So Reasonable?&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2012-04-21: Just came across a
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm&quot;&gt;blog
post from Glyn Moody&lt;/a&gt; over at Computer World UK warning about the
same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government.  I
can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder&quot;&gt;the
hearing taking place at the moment&lt;/a&gt; (respond before 2012-04-27).
It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
specifications with RAND terms.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 15 Apr 2012 12:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Behind &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu and
Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
setting together all the pieces.  This time I present to you Andreas
Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
years.  He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
up in the recently released
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze&quot;&gt;Debian
Edu Squeeze&lt;/a&gt; version.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who are you, and how do you spend your days?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany.  After
studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
Quantum Optics.  After that I worked some years in an optics company.
Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school.  I teach math, physics,
information technology and science/technology.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
project because of my interest in education and Debian.  Within the
qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
contributing.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
Debian Project!&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
downside, too.  In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
setup, if you need or want that.  Further more, it is not easily
possible to upgrade the system to a new release.  It takes much too
long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
rather small and often busy elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN&quot;&gt;Debian LAN&lt;/a&gt;
project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which free software do you use daily?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
on all my machines.  For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing.  At school I
have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
politicians, this works out great for the &quot;market-leader&quot;.  The school
administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats.  Even
free browsers do not work for the school administration.  Publishers
of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To change this, political work is very important.  Parts of the
political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to &#39;free&#39;
the system.  There is currently some discussion about &quot;Open Data&quot; and
&quot;Free/Open Standards&quot;.  I am not sure if all the involved parties have
a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
fraction takes them seriously.  However it might slowly make free
software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 8 Apr 2012 10:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu / Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;,
and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
contributor to the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze&quot;&gt;Debian
Edu Squeeze release manual&lt;/a&gt;.

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who are you, and how do you spend your days?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user!  The only
reason my name&#39;s in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
they&#39;d like a native English speaker to proofread...  So I did a sweep
through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
&quot;localisation&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;These questions are too hard for me - I don&#39;t use it!  In fact I
had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I&#39;d got out of the
education system.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
money on the latest hardware.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which free software do you use daily?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&#39;ve been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Well, I don&#39;t know.  I suppose I&#39;d be inclined to try reasoning
with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
you would hardly need a strategy.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Why the KDE menu is slow when /usr/ is NFS mounted - and a workaround</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_the_KDE_menu_is_slow_when__usr__is_NFS_mounted___and_a_workaround.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_the_KDE_menu_is_slow_when__usr__is_NFS_mounted___and_a_workaround.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 6 Apr 2012 22:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Recently I have spent time with
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slxdrift.no/&quot;&gt;Skolelinux Drift AS&lt;/a&gt; on speeding
up a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu / Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;
Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
process I discovered something very surprising.  The reason the KDE
menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
due to the way KDE find application icons.  I discovered that showing
the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server.  Most of these were

NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response.  Because the
ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
ms, the menus would be very slow.  Looking at the strace of kicker in
Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
non-existing files.  KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
one icon file.  In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
around 230 access(2) calls.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
directories, and the list of possible directories is large.  In
(almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
and .xpm.  The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
mounted.  Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
requests.  I am not the first one to discover this.  I found a
&lt;a href=&quot;https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416&quot;&gt;KDE bug report
from 2009&lt;/a&gt; about this problem, and it is still unsolved.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/.  Finally, I add symlinks to
these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
for them.  This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
almost instantaneous.  I&#39;m not quite sure where to make the package
publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
and icon handling, but also the login process.  Not quite sure how to
speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
that is not really an option at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
(at) lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 5 Apr 2012 08:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu and Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; by
Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News.  The result was made public for
non-subscribers today.  I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
for schools.  Check out his article
&lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
distribution for education&lt;/a&gt; if you want to learn more.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 1 Apr 2012 23:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Germany is a core area for the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu and Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;
user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who are you, and how do you spend your days?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&#39;ve studied Mathematics at the university &#39;Ruhr-Universität&#39; in
Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I&#39;m working as a teacher at the school
&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/&quot;&gt;Westfalen-Kolleg
Dortmund&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, a second chance school.  Here, young adults is given
the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
examination &#39;Abitur&#39;, which will allow to study at a university. This
second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
blended learning project called &#39;abitur-online.nrw&#39; and in some other
information technology related projects. For about ten years I&#39;ve been
teacher and coordinator for the &#39;abitur-online&#39; project at my
school. Being now in my early sixties, I&#39;ve decided to leave school at
the end of April this year.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
reach. At home I&#39;m using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
Skolelinux.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
clients.  The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
the admin teachers.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It&#39;s open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it&#39;s
Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
So it was a perfect choice.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Being open source, there are no license problems and so it&#39;s
possible to point teachers and students to programs like
OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp.  It&#39;s of
high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
a school and to choose where to get support for this.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Nothing yet.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which free software do you use daily?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
LibreOffice.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
that doesn&#39;t seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu screencast: Checking email with kmail using Kerberos authentication</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Checking_email_with_kmail_using_Kerberos_authentication.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Checking_email_with_kmail_using_Kerberos_authentication.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 25 Mar 2012 10:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html --&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
allowing users to check their local email account without providing
any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
and also available from &lt;a href=&quot;https://vimeo.com/38601767&quot;&gt;vimeo&lt;/a&gt;
and download as a
&lt;a href=&quot;http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv&quot;&gt;Ogg
Theora&lt;/a&gt; file.  Check it out below.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;video id=&quot;kmail-kerberos-movie&quot; width=&quot;256&quot; height=&quot;184&quot; preload controls&gt;
  &lt;source src=&quot;http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv&quot; type=&#39;video/ogg; codecs=&quot;theora, vorbis&quot;&#39; /&gt;
    &lt;p&gt;Download video as
      &lt;a href=&quot;http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv&quot;&gt;Ogg&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; 
&lt;/video&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 19 Mar 2012 21:15:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu / Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;
users are spread all across the globe.  The second inteview after
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html&quot;&gt;the
Squeeze release&lt;/a&gt; was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
long time Linux user in United Kingdom.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who are you, and how do you spend your days?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
weren&#39;t able to convert many of them into sustainable
installations.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
these things we decided to try it.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
from that I have always believed in the same &quot;sustainable computing&quot;
goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
proprietary software everywhere.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As a newcomer I&#39;m just finding out who&#39;s who in the community and
how you&#39;re organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which free software do you use daily?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I&#39;m not sure if
that counts...)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;That&#39;s a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
the notion of &quot;computer&quot; means simply &quot;proprietary office
applications&quot;.  However, schools today are experiencing budget
constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
XP.  At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
realised that we need people with programming skills, so they&#39;re
putting coding back in the curriculum! And it&#39;s encouraging that the
first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I don&#39;t really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu users in this country has to be part of it.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 16 Mar 2012 09:55:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
translated versions in sync.  To do this we have come up with what we
believe is a very efficient work flow.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ol&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The documentation is written in a
&lt;a href=&quot;http://moinmo.in&quot;&gt;moinmoin wiki&lt;/a&gt; (see for example
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze&quot;&gt;the
Squeeze release manual&lt;/a&gt;) with support for exporting the content as
docbook XML.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
.pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
with the translated text.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
which part of the original wiki document is new or changed.  They can
use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
the translation.  There is even a system in place to handle translated
images.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ol&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This setup work very well, but have a few issues.  The biggest
issue is that &lt;a href=&quot;http://moinmo.in/DocBook&quot;&gt;the docbook support
we use in moinmoin&lt;/a&gt; is not actively maintained.  The docbook
support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc&quot;&gt;debian-edu-doc
package&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 11 Mar 2012 23:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Skolelinux / Debian Edu&lt;/a&gt; based
on Debian/Squeeze.  The full announcement is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html&quot;&gt;available&lt;/a&gt;
from the project announcement list.  Now is a good time to test if it
you have not done so already.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I plan to present the new version at
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20120313-skolelinux/&quot;&gt;a NUUG
meeting&lt;/a&gt; on tuesday.  I look forward to seeing you there if you are
in Oslo, Norway.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 9 Mar 2012 11:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/&quot;&gt;the
interview series&lt;/a&gt; conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
community.  This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
more international audience.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;While &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu and
Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
Europe, there are users all around the globe.  One of those far away
from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
and contributor.  It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
work out of the box in Japan.  I got him to answer a few questions,
and am happy to share the response with you. :)


&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who are you, and how do you spend your days?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn&#39;t really improve my setup. I
did various desperate searches for things like &quot;school Linux server&quot;
and ended up in a document called &quot;Drift&quot; something or other. Reading
there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
doesn&#39;t necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
Japan.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
who don&#39;t need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is.  A
second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
multiplies. For example, backup wasn&#39;t working properly in Lenny. It
took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
help.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which free software do you use daily?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
(customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
house, that&#39;s very useful for the family photos and music.  At school
the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS.  We also
have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago.  The Edu aspect is
also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu?  But of course the main attraction is
budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
are not impressed when their USB drive doesn&#39;t work, or their browser
doesn&#39;t play flash, for example.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu screencast: Mass creation of user accounts in Squeeze</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Mass_creation_of_user_accounts_in_Squeeze.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Mass_creation_of_user_accounts_in_Squeeze.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 7 Mar 2012 13:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html --&gt;

&lt;p&gt;One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
Debian Edu Squeeze.  The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
also available from &lt;a href=&quot;http://vimeo.com/37675399&quot;&gt;vimeo&lt;/a&gt; and
download as a
&lt;a href=&quot;http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv&quot;&gt;Ogg
Theora&lt;/a&gt; file.  Check it out below.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;video id=&quot;gosa-mass-user-create-movie&quot; width=&quot;256&quot; height=&quot;184&quot; preload controls&gt;
  &lt;source src=&quot;http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv&quot; type=&#39;video/ogg; codecs=&quot;theora, vorbis&quot;&#39; /&gt;
    &lt;p&gt;Download video as
      &lt;a href=&quot;http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv&quot;&gt;Ogg&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; 
&lt;/video&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Third release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 4 Mar 2012 18:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
candidate for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu /
Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; based on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00000.html&quot;&gt;available&lt;/a&gt;
from the project announcement list.  Check it out if you
need a software solution for your school.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Stopmotion for making stop motion animations on Linux - reloaded</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Stopmotion_for_making_stop_motion_animations_on_Linux___reloaded.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Stopmotion_for_making_stop_motion_animations_on_Linux___reloaded.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 3 Mar 2012 12:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Many years ago, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Skolelinux
/ Debian Edu project&lt;/a&gt; initiated a student project to create a tool
for making stop motion movies.  The proposal came from a teacher
needing such tool on Skolelinux.  The project, called &quot;stopmotion&quot;,
was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
national aware with this great project.  The project was initiated and
mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad.  They got in touch with people at Aardman
Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
animators around the globe.  But as is usual after studying, both got
jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
project, and it has been lingering for a few years now.  Until last
year...&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
name,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/&quot;&gt;linuxstopmotion&lt;/a&gt;.
The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
Internet search engines (try to search for &#39;stopmotion&#39; to see what I
mean). I&#39;ve been following
&lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community&quot;&gt;the
mailing list&lt;/a&gt; and the improvement already in place and planned for
the future is encouraging.  If you want to make stop motion movies.
Check it out. :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Second release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 27 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
candidate for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu /
Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; based on Squeeze.  The full announcement did for some
reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/02/msg00015.html&quot;&gt;available&lt;/a&gt;
from the Debian development announcement list.  Check it out if you
need a software solution for your school.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>First release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 19 Feb 2012 23:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu / Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; based
on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00001.html&quot;&gt;available&lt;/a&gt;
on the project announcement list.  Check it out if you need a software
solution for your school.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>How to figure out which RAID disk to replace when it fail</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_figure_out_which_RAID_disk_to_replace_when_it_fail.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_figure_out_which_RAID_disk_to_replace_when_it_fail.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:25:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Once in a while my home server have disk problems.  Thanks to Linux
Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
&lt;a href=&quot;http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/34532&quot;&gt;I was
close&lt;/a&gt; this summer :).  But once a disk is starting to behave
funny, a practical problem present itself.  How to get from the Linux
device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
the disk when the computer is turned off?  In my case I have SATA
disks with a unique ID printed on the label.  All I need is a way to
figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;After fumbling a bit, I
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/&quot;&gt;found
that hdparm -I&lt;/a&gt; will report the disk serial number, which is
printed on the disk label.  The following (almost) one-liner can be
used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep &#39;(F)&#39;|tr &#39; &#39; &quot;\n&quot;|grep &#39;(F)&#39;|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
do
    printf &quot;Failed disk $d: &quot;
    hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep &#39;Serial Num&#39;
done
&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
next time, and in case other find it useful.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;At the moment I have two failing disk. :(&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
Failed disk sdd1:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
Failed disk sdd2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
Failed disk sde2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1840589
&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label.  The vendor
label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
mounted inside my box.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
Software RAID in the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html&quot;&gt;nagios-plugins-standard&lt;/a&gt;
debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail.  At the moment
it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 13 Feb 2012 23:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;New in the Squeeze version of
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu / Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; is the
ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
based on their environment.  We want all systems on the client to use
the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from &lt;tt&gt;http://wpad/wpad.dat&lt;/tt&gt;, to
allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings.  The schools can
change the global proxy setting by editing
&lt;tt&gt;tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat&lt;/tt&gt; and the change propagate
to all Debian Edu clients in the network.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
simple one, they can run arbitrary code):&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
{
   if (!isResolvable(host) ||
       isPlainHostName(host) ||
       dnsDomainIs(host, &quot;.intern&quot;))
      return &quot;DIRECT&quot;;
   else
      return &quot;PROXY webcache:3128; DIRECT&quot;;
}
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
http_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
ftp_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
would be used for
&lt;tt&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/&quot;&gt;http://www.debian.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/tt&gt;,
and insert this extracted proxy URL in &lt;tt&gt;/etc/environment&lt;/tt&gt; and
&lt;tt&gt;/etc/apt/apt.conf&lt;/tt&gt;.  The perl script wpad-extract work just
fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
javascript code is &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/631045&quot;&gt;no longer
able to build&lt;/a&gt; because the C library it depended on is now a C++
library.  I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
is frozen.  An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
known alternative is known at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
feature when it is connected to other networks.  And if no proxy is
announced, direct connections will be used instead.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
or security problem.  But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
distinction to be academic.  If you are afraid of using the wrong
proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
first place.  In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
the network setup changes.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The WPAD system is documented in a
&lt;a href=&quot;http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01&quot;&gt;IETF
draft&lt;/a&gt; and a
&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol&quot;&gt;Wikipedia
page&lt;/a&gt; for those that want to learn more.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Saving power with Debian Edu / Skolelinux using shutdown-at-night</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Saving_power_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_using_shutdown_at_night.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Saving_power_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_using_shutdown_at_night.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 5 Feb 2012 09:45:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Since the Lenny version of
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu / Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;, a
feature to save power have been included.  It is as simple as it is
practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
in the morning.  This is done using the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html&quot;&gt;shutdown-at-night&lt;/a&gt; Debian package.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts.  For Debian Edu, this is done in
LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and
shut it down if it is.  If the hardware in question is supported by
the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html&quot;&gt;nvram-wakeup&lt;/a&gt;
package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +-
10 minutes.  If this isn&#39;t working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
try to turn on the client.  The wake-on-lan option is only documented
and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
the common setup for a classroom.  The nvram-wakeup method only work
for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock.  I&#39;ve seen old
machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot.  If you have one of
those, you have to turn on the computer manually.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
also be used outside the Debian Edu environment.  For those without a
central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
&lt;tt&gt;/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night&lt;/tt&gt; to enable it.
Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Third beta version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 4 Feb 2012 13:25:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
publish the third beta version of
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu / Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; based
on Squeeze.  If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
installing new machines, check it out.  If you need a software
solution for your school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00000.html&quot;&gt;available&lt;/a&gt;
on the project announcement list.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
  10.0.0.0/8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
  the installation.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
  Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
  disabled queues are restarted every hour.  This should cut down on
  the amount of manual administration needed for printers.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The set of initial users have been changed.  Now a personal user
  for the local system administrator is created during installation
  instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
  and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
  membership.  This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
  up to date on the system.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home.  I will use it look
for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
final Squeeze release is published.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Next weekend the project organise a
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00001.html&quot;&gt;developer
gathering&lt;/a&gt; in Oslo.  We will continue the work on the Squeeze
version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version.  Perhaps I
will see you there?&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Handling non-free firmware in Debian Edu/Squeeze</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Handling_non_free_firmware_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Handling_non_free_firmware_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 27 Jan 2012 23:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
This is the sad fact of todays computers.  In the next version of
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu / Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; based
on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
firmware blobs easier to handle.  The common use case I run into is a
laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
work, but there are other use cases as well.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
during installation.  This take care firmware for network devices used
by the installer when installing from from local media.  But for
example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
not taken care of by this.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For non-network devices, we provide the script
&lt;tt&gt;/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware&lt;/tt&gt; which
search through the &lt;tt&gt;dmesg&lt;/tt&gt; output for drivers requesting extra
firmware.  The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
the requested firmware file(s) is installed.  I have proposed to do
something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/655507&quot;&gt;#655507&lt;/a&gt;), to allow PXE
installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better.  Run the
script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
firmware packages.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
included to be able to install at all.  To fill the PXE installation
initrd with extra firmware, the
&lt;tt&gt;/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware&lt;/tt&gt; script is
provided.  Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
PXE initrd with firmware packages.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
network cards working.  For this,
&lt;tt&gt;/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware&lt;/tt&gt; is
provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs.  It is used
the same way as the other firmware related tools.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation.  We
do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
non-free software, and it is their choice.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
try.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Setting up a new school with Debian Edu/Squeeze</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Setting_up_a_new_school_with_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Setting_up_a_new_school_with_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The next version of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu
/ Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; will include a new tool
&lt;tt&gt;sitesummary2ldapdhcp&lt;/tt&gt;, which can be used to quickly set up all
the computers in a school without much manual labour.  Here is a short
summary on how to use it to set up a new school.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
central server in the network.  Next, PXE boot all the client machines
as thin clients and wait 5 minutes after the last client booted to
allow the clients to report their existence to the central server.  When
this is done, log on to the central server and run
&lt;tt&gt;sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a&lt;/tt&gt; in the &lt;tt&gt;konsole&lt;/tt&gt; to use the
collected information to generate system objects in LDAP.  The output
will look similar to this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
% sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
info: Updating machine tjener.intern [10.0.2.2] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:05.
info: Create GOsa machine for auto-mac-00-01-02-03-04-06 [10.0.16.20] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:06.

Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.

Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
enter password: *******
% 
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
automatically generated names.  The final step to set up the school is
then to log into &lt;a href=&quot;https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/&quot;&gt;GOsa&lt;/a&gt;,
the web based user, group and system administration system to change
system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
enable DHCP and DNS for the systems.  All clients that should be used
as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
group.  After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
and get their assigned names and group based configuration
automatically.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
enabled this weekend.  You might want to give it a try.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2012-01-28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
hosts, one need to add the option -a.  I forgot to mention this in my
original text, and have added it to the text now.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Changing the default Iceweasel start page in Debian Edu/Squeeze</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Changing_the_default_Iceweasel_start_page_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Changing_the_default_Iceweasel_start_page_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 10 Jan 2012 15:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;In the Squeeze version of
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu / Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; soon
to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP.  In
addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
first time.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
labeledURI with &quot;http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux&quot; as the
default content.  By changing this value to another URL, all users get
to see the page behind this new URL.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool.  It can be
called as &quot;&lt;tt&gt;ldapvi -ZD &#39;(cn=admin)&#39;&lt;/tt&gt;&#39; to update LDAP with the
new setting.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
from within Iceweasel instead.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Second beta version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 7 Jan 2012 22:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
the second beta version of
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu / Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;.  If
you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
machines, check it out.  If you need a software solution for your
school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00000.html&quot;&gt;available&lt;/a&gt;
on the project announcement list.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Fixing an hanging debian installer for Debian Edu</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_an_hanging_debian_installer_for_Debian_Edu.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_an_hanging_debian_installer_for_Debian_Edu.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 3 Jan 2012 11:25:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu / Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; ready
for release.  The initial problem I looked at was particularly
interesting.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;P&gt;The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
scratch.  I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
wrap up its tasks.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Eventually the cause was found.  The kernel was simply running out
of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
because I was typing.&lt;/P&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
/proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do &#39;find /&#39; to
generate some disk IO.  Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
generate entropy.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The fix is in
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation&quot;&gt;beta1
of the Debian Edu/Squeeze&lt;/a&gt; version, and we
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu&quot;&gt;welcome more testers and
developers&lt;/a&gt;.  We plan to release beta2 this weekend.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 21 Nov 2011 12:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
up to date.  If the firmware isn&#39;t the latest and greatest, the
vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
the tools to do so.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.&lt;/P&gt;

&lt;p&gt;On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
&lt;a href=&quot;ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz&quot;&gt;an XML file&lt;/a&gt;
with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
be activated on the first reboot.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
BEGIN {
    # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
    my %rhelmodules = (
        &#39;XML::Simple&#39; =&gt; &#39;perl-XML-Simple&#39;,
        );
    for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
        eval &quot;use $module;&quot;;
        if ($@) {
            my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
            system(&quot;yum install -y $pkg&quot;);
            eval &quot;use $module;&quot;;
        }
    }
}
my $errorsto = &#39;pere@hungry.com&#39;;

upgrade_dell();

exit 0;

sub run_firmware_script {
    my ($opts, $script) = @_;
    unless ($script) {
        print STDERR &quot;fail: missing script name\n&quot;;
        exit 1
    }
    print STDERR &quot;Running $script\n\n&quot;;

    if (0 == system(&quot;sh $script $opts&quot;)) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
        print STDERR &quot;success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n&quot;;
    } else {
        print STDERR &quot;fail: firmware script returned error\n&quot;;
    }
}

sub run_firmware_scripts {
    my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
    # Run firmware packages
    for my $dir (@dirs) {
        print STDERR &quot;info: Running scripts in $dir\n&quot;;
        opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die &quot;Unable to open directory $dir: $!&quot;;
        while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
            next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
            run_firmware_script($opts, &quot;$dir/$s&quot;);
        }
        closedir $dh;
    }
}

sub download {
    my $url = shift;
    print STDERR &quot;info: Downloading $url\n&quot;;
    system(&quot;wget --quiet \&quot;$url\&quot;&quot;);
}

sub upgrade_dell {
    my @dirs;
    my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
    chomp $product;

    if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {

        # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
        system(&#39;yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail&#39;);

        my $tmpdir = tempdir(
            CLEANUP =&gt; 1
            );
        chdir($tmpdir);
        fetch_dell_fw(&#39;catalog/Catalog.xml.gz&#39;);
        system(&#39;gunzip Catalog.xml.gz&#39;);
        my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list(&#39;Catalog.xml&#39;);
        # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
        my $fwopts = &quot;-q&quot;;
        if (@paths) {
            for my $url (@paths) {
                fetch_dell_fw($url);
            }
            run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
        } else {
            print STDERR &quot;error: Unsupported Dell model &#39;$product&#39;.\n&quot;;
            print STDERR &quot;error: Please report to $errorsto.\n&quot;;
        }
        chdir(&#39;/&#39;);
    } else {
        print STDERR &quot;error: Unsupported Dell model &#39;$product&#39;.\n&quot;;
        print STDERR &quot;error: Please report to $errorsto.\n&quot;;
    }
}

sub fetch_dell_fw {
    my $path = shift;
    my $url = &quot;ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path&quot;;
    download($url);
}

# Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
# firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
# machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
    my $filename = shift;

    my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
    chomp $product;
    my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);

    print STDERR &quot;Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n&quot;;

    my $xml = XMLin($filename);
    my @paths;
    for my $bundle (@{$xml-&gt;{SoftwareBundle}}) {
        my $brand = $bundle-&gt;{TargetSystems}-&gt;{Brand}-&gt;{Display}-&gt;{content};
        my $model = $bundle-&gt;{TargetSystems}-&gt;{Brand}-&gt;{Model}-&gt;{Display}-&gt;{content};
        my $oscode;
        if (&quot;ARRAY&quot; eq ref $bundle-&gt;{TargetOSes}-&gt;{OperatingSystem}) {
            $oscode = $bundle-&gt;{TargetOSes}-&gt;{OperatingSystem}[0]-&gt;{osCode};
        } else {
            $oscode = $bundle-&gt;{TargetOSes}-&gt;{OperatingSystem}-&gt;{osCode};
        }
        if ($mybrand eq $brand &amp;&amp; $mymodel eq $model &amp;&amp; &quot;LIN&quot; eq $oscode)
        {
            @paths = map { $_-&gt;{path} } @{$bundle-&gt;{Contents}-&gt;{Package}};
        }
    }
    for my $component (@{$xml-&gt;{SoftwareComponent}}) {
        my $componenttype = $component-&gt;{ComponentType}-&gt;{value};

        # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
        next if &#39;APAC&#39; eq $componenttype;

        my $cpath = $component-&gt;{path};
        for my $path (@paths) {
            if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
                push(@paths, $cpath);
            }
        }
    }
    return @paths;
}
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
outdated.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Free e-book kiosk for the public libraries?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_e_book_kiosk_for_the_public_libraries_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_e_book_kiosk_for_the_public_libraries_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 7 Oct 2011 19:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
publishing houses how to handle electronic books.  Surprisingly, the
libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
(DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
publishing houses.  Time limited renting (2-3 years) is one proposed
model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
models.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Anyway, while reading &lt;a href=&quot;http://boklaben.no/?p=220&quot;&gt;part of
this debate&lt;/a&gt;, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
to a better model.  The idea is simple:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
solution to hand out free e-books.  As a start, the books distributed
by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt; (abount
36,000 books), &lt;a href=&quot;http://runeberg.org/&quot;&gt;Project Runenberg&lt;/a&gt;
(1149 books) and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.archive.org/details/texts&quot;&gt;The
Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt; (3,033,748 books) could be included, but any book
where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
distributed.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The computer system would make it easy to:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
  other relevant equipment.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
visiting the library.  The site would be the distribution point for
the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
books available.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Are there anyone working on a system like this?  I guess it would
fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
libraries. :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 17 Sep 2011 20:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
server.  It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
movie collection easily available.  It also make it possible to let
the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
down.  I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
subtitle options intact.  It also ensure that the entire film is one
file on the disk.  As this is for personal use, the ripping is
perfectly legal here in Norway.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
#!/bin/sh
# apt-get install lsdvd
title=$(lsdvd 2&gt;/dev/null|awk &#39;/Disc Title: / {print $3}&#39;)
dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=1M
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
been looking for a better alternative.  I have no idea why this I/O
error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
something fishy with the DVDs in question.  Or perhaps all three.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
genisoimage.  This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
back as an ISO.

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
#!/bin/sh
# apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
set -e
tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
title=$(lsdvd 2&gt;/dev/null|awk &#39;/Disc Title: / {print $3}&#39;)
dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2011-09-18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
readom program from the wodim package.  It is specially written to
read optical media, and is called like this: &lt;tt&gt;readom dev=/dev/dvd
f=image.iso&lt;/tt&gt;.  It got 6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo&quot;&gt;his
program python-dvdvideo&lt;/a&gt;, which seem to be just what I am looking
for.  Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
creating a ISO image.  The git source built and installed just fine in
Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>How is booting into runlevel 1 different from single user boots?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 4 Aug 2011 12:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Wouter Verhelst have some
&lt;a href=&quot;http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot&quot;&gt;interesting
comments and opinions&lt;/a&gt; on my blog post on
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html&quot;&gt;the
need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian&lt;/a&gt; and my blog post about
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html&quot;&gt;the
default KDE desktop in Debian&lt;/a&gt;.  I only have time to address one
small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
misunderstanding he bring forward:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
single-user system (by adding &#39;single&#39; to the kernel command line;
this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn&#39;t the same as single user
mode.  I&#39;ll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
hard to explain.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
&quot;&lt;tt&gt;~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin&lt;/tt&gt;&quot;.  This means the only thing that is
executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
state &quot;between&quot; the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
runs &quot;init -t1 S&quot; to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
1.  It is confusing that the &#39;S&#39; (single user) init mode is not the
mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
mode).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
&quot;&lt;tt&gt;/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin&lt;/tt&gt;&quot;.  When booting into
runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: &quot;&lt;tt&gt;/etc/init.d/rc
S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin&lt;/tt&gt;&quot;.  A problem show up when
trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
after visiting single user mode.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not &lt;strong&gt;required&lt;/strong&gt; to get a
functioning single user mode during boot.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>What should start from /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian? - almost nothing</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 30 Jul 2011 14:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
is presented.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
find time to push this forward.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>What is missing in the Debian desktop, or why my parents use Kubuntu</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 29 Jul 2011 08:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
issues.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
do this in Debian we would have a source.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ol&gt;

&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.&lt;/strong&gt; When there
are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
Debian.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
plugins.&lt;/strong&gt; When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
not the browser for any missing features.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
handlers.&lt;/strong&gt; When the media players encounter a format or codec
it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Better browser handling of some MIME types.&lt;/strong&gt; When
displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
latter behaviour.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ol&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
it do not matter much.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Perl modules used by FixMyStreet which are missing in Debian/Squeeze</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 26 Jul 2011 12:25:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The Norwegian &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fiksgatami.no/&quot;&gt;FiksGataMi&lt;/A&gt;
site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
security support for a few years.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
their own &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fixmystreet.com&quot;&gt;FixMyStreet&lt;/a&gt; clone
in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
missing in Debian/Squeeze isn&#39;t very long, and I hope the perl group
will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
easier in the future.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
installed on my server was a simple call to &#39;cpan2deb Module::Name&#39;
and &#39;dpkg -i&#39; to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
do not have time for.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Free Software vs. proprietary softare...</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 20 Jun 2011 12:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Reading
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/06/20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/&quot;&gt;the
thingiverse blog&lt;/a&gt;, I came across two highlights of interesting
parts of the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA&quot;&gt;Autodesk&lt;/a&gt;
and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html&quot;&gt;Microsoft
Kinect&lt;/a&gt; End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs.  Whenever I take
the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Experimental Open311 API for the mySociety fixmystreet system</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experimental_Open311_API_for_the_mySociety_fixmystreet_system.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experimental_Open311_API_for_the_mySociety_fixmystreet_system.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 30 Apr 2011 17:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Today, the first draft implementation of an
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.open311.org/&quot;&gt;Open311 API&lt;/a&gt; for the Norwegian
service &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fiksgatami.no/&quot;&gt;FiksGataMi&lt;/a&gt; started to
work.  It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Where is it?  Visit
&lt;a href=&quot;http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/&quot;&gt;http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/&lt;/a&gt;
to have a look.  Please send feedback to the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami&quot;&gt;fiksgatami
(at) nuug.no&lt;/a&gt; mailing list.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Initial notes on adding Open311 server API on FixMyStreet</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Initial_notes_on_adding_Open311_server_API_on_FixMyStreet.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Initial_notes_on_adding_Open311_server_API_on_FixMyStreet.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 29 Apr 2011 10:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.open311.org/&quot;&gt;Open311 API&lt;/a&gt; in the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fiksgatami.no/&quot;&gt;Norwegian FixMyStreet service&lt;/a&gt;.
Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://fixmystreet.org.nz/&quot;&gt;New Zealand version&lt;/a&gt; of
FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
FixMyStreet.  The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
to get a draft limping along.  In the process, I have discovered a few
issues with the Open311 specification.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
handling in the specification.  The specification seem to assume all
reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
receiving end to specify which languages are understood there.  To be
able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
know which language to use when writing a problem report.  I suspect
some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet.  One issue I
run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
each category.  The specification do not state that the identifier
should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
here.  In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
category.  As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
it.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
differ in a key part.  FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
while Open311 only have a description and lack the title.  I&#39;m not
quite sure how to best handle this yet.  When asking for a FixMyStreet
report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
near a geographic location.  I believe this is important if one is to
use Open311 as the query language for mobile units.  The specification
should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
and range= options.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
to assume only one administration.  For FixMyStreet, this mean a
report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
available depend on the location of the problem.  Not quite sure how
to best handle this.  I&#39;ve noticed
&lt;a href=&quot;http://seeclickfix.com/open311/&quot;&gt;SeeClickFix&lt;/a&gt; added
latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
Will have to investigate this a bit more.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
up with the open311 developer group.  I really wish they had a email
list available via &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gmane.org/&quot;&gt;Gmane&lt;/a&gt; to use for
discussions instead of only
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss&quot;&gt;a forum&lt;a/&gt;.  Oh,
well.  That will probably resolve itself, one way or another.  I&#39;ve
also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
seem to reply to my questions there.  This make me wonder if I just
fail to understand how the open311 community work.  It sure do not
work like the free software project communities I am used to.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code 2011</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 6 Apr 2011 09:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.getgnash.org/&quot;&gt;The Gnash project&lt;/a&gt; is still
the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
A few days ago the project
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2011-04/msg00011.html&quot;&gt;announced&lt;/a&gt;
that it will participate in Google Summer of Code.  I hope many
students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
into Gnash.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>A Norwegian FixMyStreet have kept me busy the last few weeks</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 3 Apr 2011 22:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
update in English.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
of the British service
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fixmystreet.com/&quot;&gt;FixMyStreet&lt;/a&gt; up and running,
and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mysociety.org/&quot;&gt;mySociety&lt;/a&gt; on what to develop,
and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fiksgatami.no/&quot;&gt;FiksGataMi&lt;/a&gt; is using
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openstreetmap.org/&quot;&gt;OpenStreetmap&lt;/a&gt; as the map
source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
support for this had to be added/fixed.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
public infrastructure.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
such service?&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Using NVD and CPE to track CVEs in locally maintained software</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
it should be possible to use the information about security issues
available on the Internet, and check our locally
maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
out which security holes were present in our free software
collection.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
solution.  Enter the &lt;a href=&quot;http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html&quot;&gt;Common
Platform Enumeration&lt;/a&gt; dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
mapped to CVEs in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.nvd.nist.gov/&quot;&gt;National
Vulnerability Database&lt;/a&gt;, allowing me to look up know security
issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
This is fairly trivial (I google for &#39;cve cpe $package&#39; and check the
NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
check out, one could look up
&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search?cpe=cpe%3A%2Fa%3Agnu%3Agzip:1.3.3&quot;&gt;cpe:/a:gnu:gzip:1.3.3
in NVD&lt;/a&gt; and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
The most recent one is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001&quot;&gt;CVE-2010-0001&lt;/a&gt;,
and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
list of affected versions is provided.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I&#39;ve written a
small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
security issues out.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
RHEL is providing
&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt&quot;&gt;a
map from CVE to CPE&lt;/a&gt;, indicating that they are using the CPE
information.  I&#39;m not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
established soon.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
for their packages.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Which module is loaded for a given PCI and USB device?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 23 Jan 2011 00:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;In the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data&quot;&gt;discover-data&lt;/a&gt;
package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
about the running hardware for use when people report missing
information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
&lt;tt&gt;/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3&gt;&amp;1&lt;/tt&gt;.  The relevant output on
one of my machines like this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
loaded modules:
10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
10de:03ec pata_amd
10de:03f6 sata_nv
1022:1103 k8temp
109e:036e bttv
109e:0878 snd_bt87x
11ab:4364 sky2
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
    echo loaded pci modules:
    (
        cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
        for address in * ; do
            if [ -d &quot;$address/driver/module&quot; ] ; then
                module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
                if grep -q &quot;^$module &quot; /proc/modules ; then
                    address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
                    id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk &#39;{print $3}&#39;`
                    echo &quot;$id $module&quot;
                fi
            fi
        done
    )
    echo
fi
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
mappings:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
    echo loaded usb modules:
    (
        cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
        for address in * ; do
            if [ -d &quot;$address/driver/module&quot; ] ; then
                module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
                if grep -q &quot;^$module &quot; /proc/modules ; then
                    address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
                    id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk &#39;{print $6}&#39;)
                    if [ &quot;$id&quot; ] ; then
                        echo &quot;$id $module&quot;
                    fi
                fi
            fi
        done
    )
    echo
fi
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
well.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>The video format most supported in web browsers?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_video_format_most_supported_in_web_browsers_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_video_format_most_supported_in_web_browsers_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 16 Jan 2011 00:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H.264 and WebM.  Most video sites
seem to use H.264, while others use Ogg Theora.  Interestingly enough,
the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
H.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
the Wikipedia article on
&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video&quot;&gt;HTML5 video&lt;/a&gt;,
this is not true.  Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
different browsers there.  The format supported by most browsers is
Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
Firefox.  H.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
Explorer.  Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
Safari can install plugins to get it.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
HTML5 video tag.   Of course to reach all those without a browser
handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms.  In
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nuug.no/&quot;&gt;NUUG&lt;/a&gt;, we provide first fallback to a
plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
Theora.  This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an &lt;a
href=&quot;http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20110111-semantic-web/&quot;&gt;example
from last week&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H.264 is
the least supported is simple.  Implementing and using H.264
require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
are incompatible with free software licensing.  If you believed H.264
was without royalties and license terms, check out
&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/&quot;&gt;H.264 – Not The Kind Of
Free That Matters&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Simon Phipps.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
available from
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos&quot;&gt;the
Xiph.org wiki&lt;/a&gt;, if you want to have a look.  I&#39;m not aware of a
similar list for WebM nor H.264.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2011-01-16 09:40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
&amp;lt;video&amp;gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Chrome plan to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &amp;lt;video&amp;gt;</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Chrome_plan_to_drop_H_264_support_for_HTML5__lt_video_gt_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Chrome_plan_to_drop_H_264_support_for_HTML5__lt_video_gt_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 12 Jan 2011 22:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Today I discovered
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.digi.no/860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome&quot;&gt;via
digi.no&lt;/a&gt; that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html&quot;&gt;yesterday
announced&lt;/a&gt; plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &amp;lt;video&amp;gt; in
the browser.  The argument used is that H.264 is not a &quot;completely
open&quot; codec technology.  If you believe H.264 was free for everyone
to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/&quot;&gt;H.264 – Not The Kind Of
Free That Matters&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.  It is not free of cost for creators of video
tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
licensing the patents needed for H.264.  Some background information
on the Google announcement is available from
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.osnews.com/story/24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome&quot;&gt;OSnews&lt;/a&gt;.
A good read. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
the Internet.  This can only be done by publishing using free and open
standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
for these free and open standards.  At the moment there seem to be two
camps in the web browser world when it come to video support.  Some
browsers support H.264, and others support
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theora.org/&quot;&gt;Ogg Theora&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.webmproject.org/&quot;&gt;WebM&lt;/a&gt;
(&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.diracvideo.org/&quot;&gt;Dirac&lt;/a&gt; is not really an option
yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
H.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
Wikipedia keep &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video&quot;&gt;an
updated summary&lt;/a&gt; of the current browser support.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
promoting H.264, and John Gruber
&lt;a href=&quot;http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/simple_questions&quot;&gt;presents
the mind set&lt;/a&gt; of these people quite well.  His rhetorical questions
provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.osnews.com/story/24245/10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM&quot;&gt;presenting
the issues with H.264&lt;/a&gt;. Both are worth a read.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Some argue that if Google is dropping H.264 because it isn&#39;t free,
they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin.  This
argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm&quot;&gt;todays
blog post&lt;/a&gt;, which I find to put the issue in context.  To me it
make perfect sense to drop native H.264 support for HTML5 in the
browser while still allowing plugins.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
is that all the users and promoters of H.264 suddenly get an uneasy
feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse.  A lot of TV
broadcasters have been moving to H.264 the last few years, and a lot
of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
publishing.  Suddenly this belief is shaken.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;An interesting question is why Google is doing this.  While the
presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
present the argument if the change make sense from a business
perspective.  One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
feeling that dropping H.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
video format not requiring royalties at all.  A third reason might be
that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
I guess time will tell.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html&quot;&gt;more
background and information on the move&lt;/a&gt; it a blog post yesterday.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>What standards are Free and Open as defined by Digistan?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_standards_are_Free_and_Open_as_defined_by_Digistan_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_standards_are_Free_and_Open_as_defined_by_Digistan_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 30 Dec 2010 23:15:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;After trying to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html&quot;&gt;compare
Ogg Theora&lt;/a&gt; to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition&quot;&gt;the Digistan
definition&lt;/a&gt; of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
this.  As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
JPEG, PNG, SVG and others.  But to be able to complete this in a
reasonable time frame, I will need help.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with this work, please visit
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse&quot;&gt;the
wiki pages I have set up for this&lt;/a&gt;, and let me know that you want
to help out.  The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
of the Norwegian Unix User Group).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do.  Do not be
scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>The many definitions of a open standard</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 27 Dec 2010 14:45:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition&quot;&gt;Free and
Open Standard&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
the term has been decided by Digistan.  The term &quot;Open Standard&quot; has
become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
about standards.  One end up discussing which definition is the best
one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
standards, here are a few that I know about.  This list is not
complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
complete survey.  More definitions are available on the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard&quot;&gt;wikipedia
page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
Interoperability Framework version 1.0.  Really sad to notice that BSA
and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version 2.0 of the
framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
their own people.  Anyway, the definition is still available and it
include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
specification on equal terms.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
open standard:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
(consensus or majority decision etc.).&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The standard has been published and the standard specification
document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
nominal fee.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
(parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
free basis.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Another one originates from my friends over at
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dkuug.dk/&quot;&gt;DKUUG&lt;/a&gt;, who coined and gathered
support for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aaben-standard.dk/&quot;&gt;this
definition&lt;/a&gt; in 2004.  It even made it into the Danish parlament as
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm&quot;&gt;their
definition of a open standard&lt;/a&gt;.  Another from a different part of
the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ol&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
tilgængelig.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
&quot;standardiseringsorganisation&quot;) via en åben proces.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ol&gt;

&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Then there is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html&quot;&gt;the
definition&lt;/a&gt; from Free Software Foundation Europe.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ol&gt;

&lt;li&gt;subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
manner equally available to all parties;&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
Standard themselves;&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
any party or in any business model;&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
parties;&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;available in multiple complete implementations by competing
vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
parties.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ol&gt;

&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
its
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%20Standard%20Definition.pdf&quot;&gt;Open
Standards Checklist&lt;/a&gt; with a fairly detailed description.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Creation and Management of an Open Standard

&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Its development and management process must be collaborative and
  democratic:

         &lt;ul&gt;

         &lt;li&gt;Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
            participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
            imposed by the organization under which it is developed
            and managed.&lt;/li&gt;

         &lt;li&gt;The processes must be documented and, through a known
            method, can be changed through input from all
            participants.&lt;/li&gt;

         &lt;li&gt;The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
            the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.&lt;/li&gt;

         &lt;li&gt;Development and management should strive for consensus,
            and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.&lt;/li&gt;

         &lt;li&gt;The standard specification must be open to extensive
            public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
            comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.&lt;/li&gt;

         &lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Use and Licensing of an Open Standard&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
  and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
  implementations to the interface described in the standard without
  undue or restrictive constraints.  Interfaces include APIs,
  protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt; The standard must not contain any proprietary &quot;hooks&quot; that create
  a technical or economic barriers&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Faithful implementations of the standard must
  interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
  program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
  programs and mutually to use the information which has been
  exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
  file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
  conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
  computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
  intended to function.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
  standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
  must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
  fees; also known as &quot;royalty free&quot;), worldwide, non-exclusive and
  perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
  sell products based on the standard.  The only exceptions are
  terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
  outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
  patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
  only for the exact scope of the standard in question.

      &lt;ul&gt;

      &lt;li&gt; May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
        licensees&#39; patent claims essential to practice that standard
        (also known as a reciprocity clause)&lt;/li&gt;

      &lt;li&gt; May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
        or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
        essential to practice that standard (also known as a
        &quot;defensive suspension&quot; clause)&lt;/li&gt;

      &lt;li&gt; The same licensing terms are available to every potential
        licensor&lt;/li&gt;

      &lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
  implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
  or restricted licensing terms&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
there are so many of them.  As you can see, the same holds true for
open standard definitions.  Most of the definitions have a lot in
common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
competition to downplay the significance of open standards.  I hope we
can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
Standards.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Is Ogg Theora a free and open standard?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 25 Dec 2010 20:25:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition&quot;&gt;The
Digistan definition&lt;/a&gt; of a free and open standard reads like this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
as follows:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ol&gt;

&lt;li&gt;A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
open decision-making procedure available to all interested
parties.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The standard has been published and the standard specification
document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
distribute, and use it freely.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ol&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
products based on the standard.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
and open standard according to this definition.  Here is a short
writeup of what I have been able to gather so far.  I brought up the
topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/2009-July/001632.html&quot;&gt;in
July 2009&lt;/a&gt;, for those that want to see some background information.
According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Free from vendor capture?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
Ogg Theora specification.  It can be argued that the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.xiph.org/&quot;&gt;Xiph foundation&lt;/A&gt; is such vendor, but
given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
obvious that this is a real risk.  One issue with the Xiph
foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
control the foundation) are not easily available on the web.  I&#39;ve
been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
where is is spent in the foundation.  It is thus not obvious for an
external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
specification.  But it seem unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
claim it to be, this point is fulfilled.  If Xiph foundation is
controlled by a single vendor, it isn&#39;t, but I have not found any
documentation indicating this.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;According to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf&quot;&gt;a report&lt;/a&gt;
prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
report is correct.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Specification freely available?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The specification for the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/&quot;&gt;Ogg
container format&lt;/a&gt; and both the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/&quot;&gt;Vorbis&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://theora.org/doc/&quot;&gt;Theora&lt;/a&gt; codeces are available on
the web.  This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:

&lt;blockquote&gt;

Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
specification compliance.

&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt&quot;&gt;RFC 3533&lt;/a&gt;, and
this is the term:&lt;p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
translate it into languages other than English.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
this term seem to be fulfilled.  There might be a problem with the
missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
thus reuse it in other specifications.  Not quite sure if that is a
requirement for the Digistan definition.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Royalty-free?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
Theora format.
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=65782&quot;&gt;MPEG-LA&lt;/a&gt;
and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit&quot;&gt;Steve
Jobs&lt;/a&gt; in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
them.  Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
without paying any royalties.  For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H.264 codec
than any real problem with Ogg Theora.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No constraints on re-use?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;3 of 5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining 2
depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation.  Given the
background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
this.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
see if they are free and open standards.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>The reply from Edgar Villanueva to Microsoft in Peru</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_reply_from_Edgar_Villanueva_to_Microsoft_in_Peru.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_reply_from_Edgar_Villanueva_to_Microsoft_in_Peru.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 25 Dec 2010 10:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;A few days ago
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece&quot;&gt;an
article&lt;/a&gt; in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
2.0 of
&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework&quot;&gt;European
Interoperability Framework&lt;/a&gt; has been successfully lobbied by the
proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
Nothing very surprising there, given
&lt;a href=&quot;http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/29/2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe&quot;&gt;earlier
reports&lt;/a&gt; on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
this work.  But I find this very sad.   The definition of
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-200506.txt&quot;&gt;an
open standard from version 1&lt;/a&gt; was very good, and something I
believe should be used also in the future, alongside
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition&quot;&gt;the
definition from Digistan&lt;/A&gt;.  Version 2 have removed the open
standard definition from its content.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
in the public sector in Peru.  As the text was not available from a
few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
&lt;a href=&quot;http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html&quot;&gt;my
source&lt;/a&gt; to ensure it is available also in the future.  Some
background information about that story is available in
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6099&quot;&gt;an article&lt;/a&gt; from
Linux Journal in 2002.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Lima, 8th of April, 2002&lt;br&gt; 
To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ&lt;br&gt;
General Manager of Microsoft Perú&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;Dear Sir:&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;First of all, I thank you for your letter of March 25, 2002 in which you state the official position of Microsoft relative to Bill Number 1609, Free Software in Public Administration, which is indubitably inspired by the desire for Peru to find a suitable place in the global technological context. In the same spirit, and convinced that we will find the best solutions through an exchange of clear and open ideas, I will take this opportunity to reply to the commentaries included in your letter.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;While acknowledging that opinions such as yours constitute a significant contribution, it would have been even more worthwhile for me if, rather than formulating objections of a general nature (which we will analyze in detail later) you had gathered solid arguments for the advantages that proprietary software could bring to the Peruvian State, and to its citizens in general, since this would have allowed a more enlightening exchange in respect of each of our positions.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;With the aim of creating an orderly debate, we will assume that what you call &quot;open source software&quot; is what the Bill defines as &quot;free software&quot;, since there exists software for which the source code is distributed together with the program, but which does not fall within the definition established by the Bill; and that what you call &quot;commercial software&quot; is what the Bill defines as &quot;proprietary&quot; or &quot;unfree&quot;, given that there exists free software which is sold in the market for a price like any other good or service.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;It is also necessary to make it clear that the aim of the Bill we are discussing is not directly related to the amount of direct savings that can by made by using free software in state institutions. That is in any case a marginal aggregate value, but in no way is it the chief focus of the Bill. The basic principles which inspire the Bill are linked to the basic guarantees of a state of law, such as:&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Free access to public information by the citizen. &lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Permanence of public data. &lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Security of the State and citizens.&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To guarantee the free access of citizens to public information, it is indispensable that the encoding of data is not tied to a single provider. The use of standard and open formats gives a guarantee of this free access, if necessary through the creation of compatible free software.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;To guarantee the permanence of public data, it is necessary that the usability and maintenance of the software does not depend on the goodwill of the suppliers, or on the monopoly conditions imposed by them. For this reason the State needs systems the development of which can be guaranteed due to the availability of the source code.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;To guarantee national security or the security of the State, it is indispensable to be able to rely on systems without elements which allow control from a distance or the undesired transmission of information to third parties. Systems with source code freely accessible to the public are required to allow their inspection by the State itself, by the citizens, and by a large number of independent experts throughout the world. Our proposal brings further security, since the knowledge of the source code will eliminate the growing number of programs with *spy code*. &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In the same way, our proposal strengthens the security of the citizens, both in their role as legitimate owners of information managed by the state, and in their role as consumers. In this second case, by allowing the growth of a widespread availability of free software not containing *spy code* able to put at risk privacy and individual freedoms.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In this sense, the Bill is limited to establishing the conditions under which the state bodies will obtain software in the future, that is, in a way compatible with these basic principles.&lt;/p&gt; 


&lt;p&gt;From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:&lt;br&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;the law does not specify which concrete software to use&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought&lt;/li&gt; 
&lt;li&gt;the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.&lt;/li&gt; 

&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;What the Bill does express clearly, is that, for software to be acceptable for the state it is not enough that it is technically capable of fulfilling a task, but that further the contractual conditions must satisfy a series of requirements regarding the license, without which the State cannot guarantee the citizen adequate processing of his data, watching over its integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility throughout time, as these are very critical aspects for its normal functioning.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;We agree, Mr. Gonzalez, that information and communication technology have a significant impact on the quality of life of the citizens (whether it be positive or negative). We surely also agree that the basic values I have pointed out above are fundamental in a democratic state like Peru. So we are very interested to know of any other way of guaranteeing these principles, other than through the use of free software in the terms defined by the Bill.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;Firstly, you point out that: &quot;1. The bill makes it compulsory for all public bodies to use only free software, that is to say open source software, which breaches the principles of equality before the law, that of non-discrimination and the right of free private enterprise, freedom of industry and of contract, protected by the constitution.&quot;&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;This understanding is in error. The Bill in no way affects the rights you list; it limits itself entirely to establishing conditions for the use of software on the part of state institutions, without in any way meddling in private sector transactions. It is a well established principle that the State does not enjoy the wide spectrum of contractual freedom of the private sector, as it is limited in its actions precisely by the requirement for transparency of public acts; and in this sense, the preservation of the greater common interest must prevail when legislating on the matter.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;The Bill protects equality under the law, since no natural or legal person is excluded from the right of offering these goods to the State under the conditions defined in the Bill and without more limitations than those established by the Law of State Contracts and Purchasing (T.U.O. by Supreme Decree No. 012-2001-PCM).&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;The Bill does not introduce any discrimination whatever, since it only establishes *how* the goods have to be provided (which is a state power) and not *who* has to provide them (which would effectively be discriminatory, if restrictions based on national origin, race religion, ideology, sexual preference etc. were imposed). On the contrary, the Bill is decidedly antidiscriminatory. This is so because by defining with no room for doubt the conditions for the provision of software, it prevents state bodies from using software which has a license including discriminatory conditions.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;It should be obvious from the preceding two paragraphs that the Bill does not harm free private enterprise, since the latter can always choose under what conditions it will produce software; some of these will be acceptable to the State, and others will not be since they contradict the guarantee of the basic principles listed above. This free initiative is of course compatible with the freedom of industry and freedom of contract (in the limited form in which the State can exercise the latter). Any private subject can produce software under the conditions which the State requires, or can refrain from doing so. Nobody is forced to adopt a model of production, but if they wish to provide software to the State, they must provide the mechanisms which guarantee the basic principles, and which are those described in the Bill.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;By way of an example: nothing in the text of the Bill would prevent your company offering the State bodies an office &quot;suite&quot;, under the conditions defined in the Bill and setting the price that you consider satisfactory. If you did not, it would not be due to restrictions imposed by the law, but to business decisions relative to the method of commercializing your products, decisions with which the State is not involved.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;To continue; you note that:&quot; 2. The bill, by making the use of open source software compulsory, would establish discriminatory and non competitive practices in the contracting and purchasing by public bodies...&quot;&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;This statement is just a reiteration of the previous one, and so the response can be found above. However, let us concern ourselves for a moment with your comment regarding &quot;non-competitive ... practices.&quot;&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;Of course, in defining any kind of purchase, the buyer sets conditions which relate to the proposed use of the good or service. From the start, this excludes certain manufacturers from the possibility of competing, but does not exclude them &quot;a priori&quot;, but rather based on a series of principles determined by the autonomous will of the purchaser, and so the process takes place in conformance with the law. And in the Bill it is established that *no one* is excluded from competing as far as he guarantees the fulfillment of the basic principles.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the Bill *stimulates* competition, since it tends to generate a supply of software with better conditions of usability, and to better existing work, in a model of continuous improvement.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the central aspect of competivity is the chance to provide better choices to the consumer. Now, it is impossible to ignore the fact that marketing does not play a neutral role when the product is offered on the market (since accepting the opposite would lead one to suppose that firms&#39; expenses in marketing lack any sense), and that therefore a significant expense under this heading can influence the decisions of the purchaser. This influence of marketing is in large measure reduced by the bill that we are backing, since the choice within the framework proposed is based on the *technical merits* of the product and not on the effort put into commercialization by the producer; in this sense, competitiveness is increased, since the smallest software producer can compete on equal terms with the most powerful corporations.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;It is necessary to stress that there is no position more anti-competitive than that of the big software producers, which frequently abuse their dominant position, since in innumerable cases they propose as a solution to problems raised by users: &quot;update your software to the new version&quot; (at the user&#39;s expense, naturally); furthermore, it is common to find arbitrary cessation of technical help for products, which, in the provider&#39;s judgment alone, are &quot;old&quot;; and so, to receive any kind of technical assistance, the user finds himself forced to migrate to new versions (with non-trivial costs, especially as changes in hardware platform are often involved). And as the whole infrastructure is based on proprietary data formats, the user stays &quot;trapped&quot; in the need to continue using products from the same supplier, or to make the huge effort to change to another environment (probably also proprietary).&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;You add: &quot;3. So, by compelling the State to favor a business model based entirely on open source, the bill would only discourage the local and international manufacturing companies, which are the ones which really undertake important expenditures, create a significant number of direct and indirect jobs, as well as contributing to the GNP, as opposed to a model of open source software which tends to have an ever weaker economic impact, since it mainly creates jobs in the service sector.&quot;&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;I do not agree with your statement. Partly because of what you yourself point out in paragraph 6 of your letter, regarding the relative weight of services in the context of software use. This contradiction alone would invalidate your position. The service model, adopted by a large number of companies in the software industry, is much larger in economic terms, and with a tendency to increase, than the licensing of programs.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the private sector of the economy has the widest possible freedom to choose the economic model which best suits its interests, even if this freedom of choice is often obscured subliminally by the disproportionate expenditure on marketing by the producers of proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;In addition, a reading of your opinion would lead to the conclusion that the State market is crucial and essential for the proprietary software industry, to such a point that the choice made by the State in this bill would completely eliminate the market for these firms. If that is true, we can deduce that the State must be subsidizing the proprietary software industry. In the unlikely event that this were true, the State would have the right to apply the subsidies in the area it considered of greatest social value; it is undeniable, in this improbable hypothesis, that if the State decided to subsidize software, it would have to do so choosing the free over the proprietary, considering its social effect and the rational use of taxpayers money.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;In respect of the jobs generated by proprietary software in countries like ours, these mainly concern technical tasks of little aggregate value; at the local level, the technicians who provide support for proprietary software produced by transnational companies do not have the possibility of fixing bugs, not necessarily for lack of technical capability or of talent, but because they do not have access to the source code to fix it. With free software one creates more technically qualified employment and a framework of free competence where success is only tied to the ability to offer good technical support and quality of service, one stimulates the market, and one increases the shared fund of knowledge, opening up alternatives to generate services of greater total value and a higher quality level, to the benefit of all involved: producers, service organizations, and consumers.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;It is a common phenomenon in developing countries that local software industries obtain the majority of their takings in the service sector, or in the creation of &quot;ad hoc&quot; software. Therefore, any negative impact that the application of the Bill might have in this sector will be more than compensated by a growth in demand for services (as long as these are carried out to high quality standards). If the transnational software companies decide not to compete under these new rules of the game, it is likely that they will undergo some decrease in takings in terms of payment for licenses; however, considering that these firms continue to allege that much of the software used by the State has been illegally copied, one can see that the impact will not be very serious. Certainly, in any case their fortune will be determined by market laws, changes in which cannot be avoided; many firms traditionally associated with proprietary software have already set out on the road (supported by copious expense) of providing services associated with free software, which shows that the models are not mutually exclusive.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;With this bill the State is deciding that it needs to preserve certain fundamental values. And it is deciding this based on its sovereign power, without affecting any of the constitutional guarantees. If these values could be guaranteed without having to choose a particular economic model, the effects of the law would be even more beneficial. In any case, it should be clear that the State does not choose an economic model; if it happens that there only exists one economic model capable of providing software which provides the basic guarantee of these principles, this is because of historical circumstances, not because of an arbitrary choice of a given model.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;Your letter continues: &quot;4. The bill imposes the use of open source software without considering the dangers that this can bring from the point of view of security, guarantee, and possible violation of the intellectual property rights of third parties.&quot;&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;Alluding in an abstract way to &quot;the dangers this can bring&quot;, without specifically mentioning a single one of these supposed dangers, shows at the least some lack of knowledge of the topic. So, allow me to enlighten you on these points.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;On security:&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;National security has already been mentioned in general terms in the initial discussion of the basic principles of the bill. In more specific terms, relative to the security of the software itself, it is well known that all software (whether proprietary or free) contains errors or &quot;bugs&quot; (in programmers&#39; slang). But it is also well known that the bugs in free software are fewer, and are fixed much more quickly, than in proprietary software. It is not in vain that numerous public bodies responsible for the IT security of state systems in developed countries require the use of free software for the same conditions of security and efficiency.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;What is impossible to prove is that proprietary software is more secure than free, without the public and open inspection of the scientific community and users in general. This demonstration is impossible because the model of proprietary software itself prevents this analysis, so that any guarantee of security is based only on promises of good intentions (biased, by any reckoning) made by the producer itself, or its contractors.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;It should be remembered that in many cases, the licensing conditions include Non-Disclosure clauses which prevent the user from publicly revealing security flaws found in the licensed proprietary product.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;In respect of the guarantee:&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;As you know perfectly well, or could find out by reading the &quot;End User License Agreement&quot; of the products you license, in the great majority of cases the guarantees are limited to replacement of the storage medium in case of defects, but in no case is compensation given for direct or indirect damages, loss of profits, etc... If as a result of a security bug in one of your products, not fixed in time by yourselves, an attacker managed to compromise crucial State systems, what guarantees, reparations and compensation would your company make in accordance with your licensing conditions? The guarantees of proprietary software, inasmuch as programs are delivered ``AS IS&#39;&#39;, that is, in the state in which they are, with no additional responsibility of the provider in respect of function, in no way differ from those normal with free software.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;On Intellectual Property:&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;Questions of intellectual property fall outside the scope of this bill, since they are covered by specific other laws. The model of free software in no way implies ignorance of these laws, and in fact the great majority of free software is covered by copyright. In reality, the inclusion of this question in your observations shows your confusion in respect of the legal framework in which free software is developed. The inclusion of the intellectual property of others in works claimed as one&#39;s own is not a practice that has been noted in the free software community; whereas, unfortunately, it has been in the area of proprietary software. As an example, the condemnation by the Commercial Court of Nanterre, France, on 27th September 2001 of Microsoft Corp. to a penalty of 3 million francs in damages and interest, for violation of intellectual property (piracy, to use the unfortunate term that your firm commonly uses in its publicity).&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;You go on to say that: &quot;The bill uses the concept of open source software incorrectly, since it does not necessarily imply that the software is free or of zero cost, and so arrives at mistaken conclusions regarding State savings, with no cost-benefit analysis to validate its position.&quot;&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;This observation is wrong; in principle, freedom and lack of cost are orthogonal concepts: there is software which is proprietary and charged for (for example, MS Office), software which is proprietary and free of charge (MS Internet Explorer), software which is free and charged for (Red Hat, SuSE etc GNU/Linux distributions), software which is free and not charged for (Apache, Open Office, Mozilla), and even software which can be licensed in a range of combinations (MySQL).&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;Certainly free software is not necessarily free of charge. And the text of the bill does not state that it has to be so, as you will have noted after reading it. The definitions included in the Bill state clearly *what* should be considered free software, at no point referring to freedom from charges. Although the possibility of savings in payments for proprietary software licenses are mentioned, the foundations of the bill clearly refer to the fundamental guarantees to be preserved and to the stimulus to local technological development. Given that a democratic State must support these principles, it has no other choice than to use software with publicly available source code, and to exchange information only in standard formats.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;If the State does not use software with these characteristics, it will be weakening basic republican principles. Luckily, free software also implies lower total costs; however, even given the hypothesis (easily disproved) that it was more expensive than proprietary software, the simple existence of an effective free software tool for a particular IT function would oblige the State to use it; not by command of this Bill, but because of the basic principles we enumerated at the start, and which arise from the very essence of the lawful democratic State.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;You continue: &quot;6. It is wrong to think that Open Source Software is free of charge. Research by the Gartner Group (an important investigator of the technological market recognized at world level) has shown that the cost of purchase of software (operating system and applications) is only 8% of the total cost which firms and institutions take on for a rational and truly beneficial use of the technology. The other 92% consists of: installation costs, enabling, support, maintenance, administration, and down-time.&quot;&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;This argument repeats that already given in paragraph 5 and partly contradicts paragraph 3. For the sake of brevity we refer to the comments on those paragraphs. However, allow me to point out that your conclusion is logically false: even if according to Gartner Group the cost of software is on average only 8% of the total cost of use, this does not in any way deny the existence of software which is free of charge, that is, with a licensing cost of zero.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;In addition, in this paragraph you correctly point out that the service components and losses due to down-time make up the largest part of the total cost of software use, which, as you will note, contradicts your statement regarding the small value of services suggested in paragraph 3. Now the use of free software contributes significantly to reduce the remaining life-cycle costs. This reduction in the costs of installation, support etc. can be noted in several areas: in the first place, the competitive service model of free software, support and maintenance for which can be freely contracted out to a range of suppliers competing on the grounds of quality and low cost. This is true for installation, enabling, and support, and in large part for maintenance. In the second place, due to the reproductive characteristics of the model, maintenance carried out for an application is easily replicable, without incurring large costs (that is, without paying more than once for the same thing) since modifications, if one wishes, can be incorporated in the common fund of knowledge. Thirdly, the huge costs caused by non-functioning software (&quot;blue screens of death&quot;, malicious code such as virus, worms, and trojans, exceptions, general protection faults and other well-known problems) are reduced considerably by using more stable software; and it is well known that one of the most notable virtues of free software is its stability.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;You further state that: &quot;7. One of the arguments behind the bill is the supposed freedom from costs of open-source software, compared with the costs of commercial software, without taking into account the fact that there exist types of volume licensing which can be highly advantageous for the State, as has happened in other countries.&quot;&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;I have already pointed out that what is in question is not the cost of the software but the principles of freedom of information, accessibility, and security. These arguments have been covered extensively in the preceding paragraphs to which I would refer you.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there certainly exist types of volume licensing (although unfortunately proprietary software does not satisfy the basic principles). But as you correctly pointed out in the immediately preceding paragraph of your letter, they only manage to reduce the impact of a component which makes up no more than 8% of the total.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;You continue: &quot;8. In addition, the alternative adopted by the bill (I) is clearly more expensive, due to the high costs of software migration, and (II) puts at risk compatibility and interoperability of the IT platforms within the State, and between the State and the private sector, given the hundreds of versions of open source software on the market.&quot;&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;Let us analyze your statement in two parts. Your first argument, that migration implies high costs, is in reality an argument in favor of the Bill. Because the more time goes by, the more difficult migration to another technology will become; and at the same time, the security risks associated with proprietary software will continue to increase. In this way, the use of proprietary systems and formats will make the State ever more dependent on specific suppliers. Once a policy of using free software has been established (which certainly, does imply some cost) then on the contrary migration from one system to another becomes very simple, since all data is stored in open formats. On the other hand, migration to an open software context implies no more costs than migration between two different proprietary software contexts, which invalidates your argument completely.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;The second argument refers to &quot;problems in interoperability of the IT platforms within the State, and between the State and the private sector&quot; This statement implies a certain lack of knowledge of the way in which free software is built, which does not maximize the dependence of the user on a particular platform, as normally happens in the realm of proprietary software. Even when there are multiple free software distributions, and numerous programs which can be used for the same function, interoperability is guaranteed as much by the use of standard formats, as required by the bill, as by the possibility of creating interoperable software given the availability of the source code.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;You then say that: &quot;9. The majority of open source code does not offer adequate levels of service nor the guarantee from recognized manufacturers of high productivity on the part of the users, which has led various public organizations to retract their decision to go with an open source software solution and to use commercial software in its place.&quot;&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;This observation is without foundation. In respect of the guarantee, your argument was rebutted in the response to paragraph 4. In respect of support services, it is possible to use free software without them (just as also happens with proprietary software), but anyone who does need them can obtain support separately, whether from local firms or from international corporations, again just as in the case of proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it would contribute greatly to our analysis if you could inform us about free software projects *established* in public bodies which have already been abandoned in favor of proprietary software. We know of a good number of cases where the opposite has taken place, but not know of any where what you describe has taken place.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;You continue by observing that: &quot;10. The bill discourages the creativity of the Peruvian software industry, which invoices 40 million US$/year, exports 4 million US$ (10th in ranking among non-traditional exports, more than handicrafts) and is a source of highly qualified employment. With a law that encourages the use of open source, software programmers lose their intellectual property rights and their main source of payment.&quot;&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;It is clear enough that nobody is forced to commercialize their code as free software. The only thing to take into account is that if it is not free software, it cannot be sold to the public sector. This is not in any case the main market for the national software industry. We covered some questions referring to the influence of the Bill on the generation of employment which would be both highly technically qualified and in better conditions for competition above, so it seems unnecessary to insist on this point.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;What follows in your statement is incorrect. On the one hand, no author of free software loses his intellectual property rights, unless he expressly wishes to place his work in the public domain. The free software movement has always been very respectful of intellectual property, and has generated widespread public recognition of its authors. Names like those of Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, Larry Wall, Miguel de Icaza, Andrew Tridgell, Theo de Raadt, Andrea Arcangeli, Bruce Perens, Darren Reed, Alan Cox, Eric Raymond, and many others, are recognized world-wide for their contributions to the development of software that is used today by millions of people throughout the world. On the other hand, to say that the rewards for authors rights make up the main source of payment of Peruvian programmers is in any case a guess, in particular since there is no proof to this effect, nor a demonstration of how the use of free software by the State would influence these payments.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;You go on to say that: &quot;11. Open source software, since it can be distributed without charge, does not allow the generation of income for its developers through exports. In this way, the multiplier effect of the sale of software to other countries is weakened, and so in turn is the growth of the industry, while Government rules ought on the contrary to stimulate local industry.&quot;&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;This statement shows once again complete ignorance of the mechanisms of and market for free software. It tries to claim that the market of sale of non- exclusive rights for use (sale of licenses) is the only possible one for the software industry, when you yourself pointed out several paragraphs above that it is not even the most important one. The incentives that the bill offers for the growth of a supply of better qualified professionals, together with the increase in experience that working on a large scale with free software within the State will bring for Peruvian technicians, will place them in a highly competitive position to offer their services abroad.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;You then state that: &quot;12. In the Forum, the use of open source software in education was discussed, without mentioning the complete collapse of this initiative in a country like Mexico, where precisely the State employees who founded the project now state that open source software did not make it possible to offer a learning experience to pupils in the schools, did not take into account the capability at a national level to give adequate support to the platform, and that the software did not and does not allow for the levels of platform integration that now exist in schools.&quot;&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;In fact Mexico has gone into reverse with the Red Escolar (Schools Network) project. This is due precisely to the fact that the driving forces behind the Mexican project used license costs as their main argument, instead of the other reasons specified in our project, which are far more essential. Because of this conceptual mistake, and as a result of the lack of effective support from the SEP (Secretary of State for Public Education), the assumption was made that to implant free software in schools it would be enough to drop their software budget and send them a CD ROM with Gnu/Linux instead. Of course this failed, and it couldn&#39;t have been otherwise, just as school laboratories fail when they use proprietary software and have no budget for implementation and maintenance. That&#39;s exactly why our bill is not limited to making the use of free software mandatory, but recognizes the need to create a viable migration plan, in which the State undertakes the technical transition in an orderly way in order to then enjoy the advantages of free software.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;You end with a rhetorical question: &quot;13. If open source software satisfies all the requirements of State bodies, why do you need a law to adopt it? Shouldn&#39;t it be the market which decides freely which products give most benefits or value?&quot;&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;We agree that in the private sector of the economy, it must be the market that decides which products to use, and no state interference is permissible there. However, in the case of the public sector, the reasoning is not the same: as we have already established, the state archives, handles, and transmits information which does not belong to it, but which is entrusted to it by citizens, who have no alternative under the rule of law. As a counterpart to this legal requirement, the State must take extreme measures to safeguard the integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility of this information. The use of proprietary software raises serious doubts as to whether these requirements can be fulfilled, lacks conclusive evidence in this respect, and so is not suitable for use in the public sector.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;The need for a law is based, firstly, on the realization of the fundamental principles listed above in the specific area of software; secondly, on the fact that the State is not an ideal homogeneous entity, but made up of multiple bodies with varying degrees of autonomy in decision making. Given that it is inappropriate to use proprietary software, the fact of establishing these rules in law will prevent the personal discretion of any state employee from putting at risk the information which belongs to citizens. And above all, because it constitutes an up-to-date reaffirmation in relation to the means of management and communication of information used today, it is based on the republican principle of openness to the public.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;In conformance with this universally accepted principle, the citizen has the right to know all information held by the State and not covered by well- founded declarations of secrecy based on law. Now, software deals with information and is itself information. Information in a special form, capable of being interpreted by a machine in order to execute actions, but crucial information all the same because the citizen has a legitimate right to know, for example, how his vote is computed or his taxes calculated. And for that he must have free access to the source code and be able to prove to his satisfaction the programs used for electoral computations or calculation of his taxes.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;I wish you the greatest respect, and would like to repeat that my office will always be open for you to expound your point of view to whatever level of detail you consider suitable.&lt;/p&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;Cordially,&lt;br&gt; 
DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ&lt;br&gt; 
Congressman of the Republic of Perú.&lt;/p&gt; 
&lt;/blockquote&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Officeshots still going strong</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 25 Dec 2010 09:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Half a year ago I
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html&quot;&gt;wrote
a bit&lt;/a&gt; about &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.officeshots.org/&quot;&gt;OfficeShots&lt;/a&gt;,
a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
different Office implementations handle different ODF features.  Sad
to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
for OfficeShots users yet).  I am glad to see that the ODF community
got such a great test tool available.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>How to test if a laptop is working with Linux</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 22 Dec 2010 14:55:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The last few days I have spent at work here at the &lt;a
href=&quot;http://www.uio.no/&quot;&gt;University of Oslo&lt;/a&gt; testing if the new
batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
university.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
have the time to do this for all the problems I find.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
I perform on a new model.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Is PXE installation working?  I&#39;m testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
installation, X.org is working.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
reported by the program.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
normally test this by playing
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ &quot;&gt;a HTML5
video&lt;/a&gt; in Firefox/Iceweasel.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
picture from the v4l device show up.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
few.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
notice this.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I&#39;m testing if the
special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
resume.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
not.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
existence.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
for the HP machines I am testing.  I&#39;m not done yet, so I will report
the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Some thoughts on BitCoins</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 11 Dec 2010 15:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;As I continue to explore
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bitcoin.org/&quot;&gt;BitCoin&lt;/a&gt;, I&#39;ve starting to wonder
what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
all transactions.  There I can see that my address
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;
have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3&quot;&gt;1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3&lt;/a&gt;
address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt&quot;&gt;1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt&lt;/A&gt;
of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I&#39;m told
there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
If the Skolelinux foundation
(&lt;a href=&quot;http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html&quot;&gt;SLX
Debian Labs&lt;/a&gt;) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
Given that it is impossible to know if money can across the border or
not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I&#39;m sure they
will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
currencies.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The &quot;winner&quot; get 50
BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
BitCoins.  Check out
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/&quot;&gt;BitCoin Pool&lt;/a&gt;
if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
yet.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2010-12-15: Found an &lt;a
href=&quot;http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi&quot;&gt;interesting
criticism&lt;/a&gt; of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 10 Dec 2010 08:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;With this weeks lawless
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html&quot;&gt;governmental
attacks&lt;/a&gt; on Wikileak and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech&quot;&gt;free
speech&lt;/a&gt;, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
not be trusted to handle money transactions.
A blog post from
&lt;a href=&quot;http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/&quot;&gt;Simon
Phipps on bitcoin&lt;/a&gt; reminded me about a project that a friend of
mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon&#39;s example, and get
involved with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bitcoin.org/&quot;&gt;BitCoin&lt;/a&gt;.  I got
some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
for helping me remember BitCoin.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/578157&quot;&gt;will get the package into
Debian&lt;/a&gt; soon.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
There are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bitcoin.org/trade&quot;&gt;companies accepting
bitcoins&lt;/a&gt; when selling services and goods, and there are even
currency &quot;stock&quot; markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
you can even get
&lt;a href=&quot;https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/&quot;&gt;some for free&lt;/a&gt; (0.05
bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/&quot;&gt;BitcoinWatch&lt;/a&gt; to keep an eye
on the current exchange rates.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
donations to the address
&lt;b&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/b&gt;.  Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Student group continue the work on my Reprap 3D printer</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Student_group_continue_the_work_on_my_Reprap_3D_printer.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Student_group_continue_the_work_on_my_Reprap_3D_printer.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 9 Dec 2010 19:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
student assosiation &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.robotica.no/&quot;&gt;Robotica
Osloensis&lt;/a&gt; at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
get their own 3D printer.  They wanted to learn from me based on my
work in the area.  After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon.  I look
forward to see how this goes.  This monday their volunteer driver
picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
last exam is over so they can start work on getting the 3D printer
operational.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
and seem capable of getting the reprap operational.  I really look
forward to being able to print all the cool 3D designs published on
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thingiverse.com/&quot;&gt;Thingiverse&lt;/a&gt;.  I even got
some 3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
very cool 3D scanner.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu development gathering and General Assembly for FRiSK</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_development_gathering_and_General_Assembly_for_FRiSK.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_development_gathering_and_General_Assembly_for_FRiSK.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 29 Nov 2010 18:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2010-12-03-05-Oslo&quot;&gt;development
gathering&lt;/a&gt; in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway.  I
really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
Squeeze release.  The gathering is open for everyone interested in
learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
will hold its
&lt;a href=&quot;http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/2010&quot;&gt;General Assembly
for 2010&lt;/a&gt;.  Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388
people registered as members.  Last year 32 members cast their vote in
the memberdb based election system.  I hope more people find time to
vote this year.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Why isn&#39;t Debian Edu using VLC?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 27 Nov 2010 11:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.&lt;p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
mplayer in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian
Edu/Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia&quot;&gt;last
tested the browser plugins&lt;/a&gt; available in Debian, the VLC plugin
failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.&lt;/P&gt;

&lt;p&gt;While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
what is going on.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Lenny-&gt;Squeeze upgrades of the Gnome and KDE desktop, now with apt-get autoremove</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 22 Nov 2010 14:15:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
upgrade testing of the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/&quot;&gt;Lenny
Gnome and KDE Desktop&lt;/a&gt; to do &lt;tt&gt;apt-get autoremove&lt;/tt&gt; when using apt-get.
This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
can now present the updated result from today:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This is for Gnome:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  apache2.2-bin
  aptdaemon
  baobab
  binfmt-support
  browser-plugin-gnash
  cheese-common
  cli-common
  cups-pk-helper
  dmz-cursor-theme
  empathy
  empathy-common
  freedesktop-sound-theme
  freeglut3
  gconf-defaults-service
  gdm-themes
  gedit-plugins
  geoclue
  geoclue-hostip
  geoclue-localnet
  geoclue-manual
  geoclue-yahoo
  gnash
  gnash-common
  gnome
  gnome-backgrounds
  gnome-cards-data
  gnome-codec-install
  gnome-core
  gnome-desktop-environment
  gnome-disk-utility
  gnome-screenshot
  gnome-search-tool
  gnome-session-canberra
  gnome-system-log
  gnome-themes-extras
  gnome-themes-more
  gnome-user-share
  gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
  gstreamer0.10-tools
  gtk2-engines
  gtk2-engines-pixbuf
  gtk2-engines-smooth
  hamster-applet
  libapache2-mod-dnssd
  libapr1
  libaprutil1
  libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
  libaprutil1-ldap
  libart2.0-cil
  libboost-date-time1.42.0
  libboost-python1.42.0
  libboost-thread1.42.0
  libchamplain-0.4-0
  libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
  libcheese-gtk18
  libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
  libcryptui0
  libdiscid0
  libelf1
  libepc-1.0-2
  libepc-common
  libepc-ui-1.0-2
  libfreerdp-plugins-standard
  libfreerdp0
  libgconf2.0-cil
  libgdata-common
  libgdata7
  libgdu-gtk0
  libgee2
  libgeoclue0
  libgexiv2-0
  libgif4
  libglade2.0-cil
  libglib2.0-cil
  libgmime2.4-cil
  libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
  libgnome2.24-cil
  libgnomepanel2.24-cil
  libgpod-common
  libgpod4
  libgtk2.0-cil
  libgtkglext1
  libgtksourceview2.0-common
  libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
  libmono-addins0.2-cil
  libmono-cairo2.0-cil
  libmono-corlib2.0-cil
  libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
  libmono-posix2.0-cil
  libmono-security2.0-cil
  libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
  libmono-system2.0-cil
  libmtp8
  libmusicbrainz3-6
  libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
  libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
  libopal3.6.8
  libpolkit-gtk-1-0
  libpt2.6.7
  libpython2.6
  librpm1
  librpmio1
  libsdl1.2debian
  libsrtp0
  libssh-4
  libtelepathy-farsight0
  libtelepathy-glib0
  libtidy-0.99-0
  media-player-info
  mesa-utils
  mono-2.0-gac
  mono-gac
  mono-runtime
  nautilus-sendto
  nautilus-sendto-empathy
  p7zip-full
  pkg-config
  python-aptdaemon
  python-aptdaemon-gtk
  python-axiom
  python-beautifulsoup
  python-bugbuddy
  python-clientform
  python-coherence
  python-configobj
  python-crypto
  python-cupshelpers
  python-elementtree
  python-epsilon
  python-evolution
  python-feedparser
  python-gdata
  python-gdbm
  python-gst0.10
  python-gtkglext1
  python-gtksourceview2
  python-httplib2
  python-louie
  python-mako
  python-markupsafe
  python-mechanize
  python-nevow
  python-notify
  python-opengl
  python-openssl
  python-pam
  python-pkg-resources
  python-pyasn1
  python-pysqlite2
  python-rdflib
  python-serial
  python-tagpy
  python-twisted-bin
  python-twisted-conch
  python-twisted-core
  python-twisted-web
  python-utidylib
  python-webkit
  python-xdg
  python-zope.interface
  remmina
  remmina-plugin-data
  remmina-plugin-rdp
  remmina-plugin-vnc
  rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
  rhythmbox-plugins
  rpm-common
  rpm2cpio
  seahorse-plugins
  shotwell
  software-center
  system-config-printer-udev
  telepathy-gabble
  telepathy-mission-control-5
  telepathy-salut
  tomboy
  totem
  totem-coherence
  totem-mozilla
  totem-plugins
  transmission-common
  xdg-user-dirs
  xdg-user-dirs-gtk
  xserver-xephyr
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  cheese
  ekiga
  eog
  epiphany-extensions
  evolution-exchange
  fast-user-switch-applet
  file-roller
  gcalctool
  gconf-editor
  gdm
  gedit
  gedit-common
  gnome-games
  gnome-games-data
  gnome-nettool
  gnome-system-tools
  gnome-themes
  gnuchess
  gucharmap
  guile-1.8-libs
  libavahi-ui0
  libdmx1
  libgalago3
  libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
  libgtksourceview2.0-0
  liblircclient0
  libsdl1.2debian-alsa
  libspeexdsp1
  libsvga1
  rhythmbox
  seahorse
  sound-juicer
  system-config-printer
  totem-common
  transmission-gtk
  vinagre
  vino
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
[nothing]
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This is for KDE:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  ksmserver
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  kwin
  network-manager-kde
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  arts
  dolphin
  freespacenotifier
  google-gadgets-gst
  google-gadgets-xul
  kappfinder
  kcalc
  kcharselect
  kde-core
  kde-plasma-desktop
  kde-standard
  kde-window-manager
  kdeartwork
  kdeartwork-emoticons
  kdeartwork-style
  kdeartwork-theme-icon
  kdebase
  kdebase-apps
  kdebase-workspace
  kdebase-workspace-bin
  kdebase-workspace-data
  kdeeject
  kdelibs
  kdeplasma-addons
  kdeutils
  kdewallpapers
  kdf
  kfloppy
  kgpg
  khelpcenter4
  kinfocenter
  konq-plugins-l10n
  konqueror-nsplugins
  kscreensaver
  kscreensaver-xsavers
  ktimer
  kwrite
  libgle3
  libkde4-ruby1.8
  libkonq5
  libkonq5-templates
  libnetpbm10
  libplasma-ruby
  libplasma-ruby1.8
  libqt4-ruby1.8
  marble-data
  marble-plugins
  netpbm
  nuvola-icon-theme
  plasma-dataengines-workspace
  plasma-desktop
  plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
  plasma-runners-addons
  plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
  plasma-scriptengine-python
  plasma-scriptengine-qedje
  plasma-scriptengine-ruby
  plasma-scriptengine-webkit
  plasma-scriptengines
  plasma-wallpapers-addons
  plasma-widget-folderview
  plasma-widget-networkmanagement
  ruby
  sweeper
  update-notifier-kde
  xscreensaver-data-extra
  xscreensaver-gl
  xscreensaver-gl-extra
  xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  ark
  google-gadgets-common
  google-gadgets-qt
  htdig
  kate
  kdebase-bin
  kdebase-data
  kdepasswd
  kfind
  klipper
  konq-plugins
  konqueror
  ksysguard
  ksysguardd
  libarchive1
  libcln6
  libeet1
  libeina-svn-06
  libggadget-1.0-0b
  libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
  libgps19
  libkdecorations4
  libkephal4
  libkonq4
  libkonqsidebarplugin4a
  libkscreensaver5
  libksgrd4
  libksignalplotter4
  libkunitconversion4
  libkwineffects1a
  libmarblewidget4
  libntrack-qt4-1
  libntrack0
  libplasma-geolocation-interface4
  libplasmaclock4a
  libplasmagenericshell4
  libprocesscore4a
  libprocessui4a
  libqalculate5
  libqedje0a
  libqtruby4shared2
  libqzion0a
  libruby1.8
  libscim8c2a
  libsmokekdecore4-3
  libsmokekdeui4-3
  libsmokekfile3
  libsmokekhtml3
  libsmokekio3
  libsmokeknewstuff2-3
  libsmokeknewstuff3-3
  libsmokekparts3
  libsmokektexteditor3
  libsmokekutils3
  libsmokenepomuk3
  libsmokephonon3
  libsmokeplasma3
  libsmokeqtcore4-3
  libsmokeqtdbus4-3
  libsmokeqtgui4-3
  libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
  libsmokeqtopengl4-3
  libsmokeqtscript4-3
  libsmokeqtsql4-3
  libsmokeqtsvg4-3
  libsmokeqttest4-3
  libsmokeqtuitools4-3
  libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
  libsmokeqtxml4-3
  libsmokesolid3
  libsmokesoprano3
  libtaskmanager4a
  libtidy-0.99-0
  libweather-ion4a
  libxklavier16
  libxxf86misc1
  okteta
  oxygencursors
  plasma-dataengines-addons
  plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
  plasma-widget-lancelot
  plasma-widgets-addons
  plasma-widgets-workspace
  polkit-kde-1
  ruby1.8
  systemsettings
  update-notifier-common
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Migrating Xen virtual machines using LVM to KVM using disk images</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 22 Nov 2010 11:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Most of the computers in use by the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu/Skolelinux project&lt;/a&gt;
are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I found
&lt;a href=&quot;http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM&quot;&gt;a
nice recipe&lt;/a&gt; to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
#!/bin/sh

# Based on
# http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM

set -e
set -x

if [ -z &quot;$1&quot; ] ; then
    echo &quot;Usage: $0 &amp;lt;hostname&amp;gt;&quot;
    exit 1
else
    host=&quot;$1&quot;
fi

if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
    echo &quot;error: unable to find LVM volume for $host&quot;
    exit 1
fi

# Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk &#39;{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }&#39;)
swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk &#39;{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }&#39;)
totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))

img=$host.img
#dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD

parted $img mklabel msdos
parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
parted $img set 1 boot on

modprobe dm-mod
losetup /dev/loop0 $img
kpartx -a /dev/loop0

dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2

kpartx -d /dev/loop0
losetup -d /dev/loop0
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
seem to work just fine.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Lenny-&gt;Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome and KDE desktop</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 20 Nov 2010 22:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m still running upgrade testing of the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/&quot;&gt;Lenny
Gnome and KDE Desktop&lt;/a&gt;, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
can see if anything should be changed.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This is for Gnome:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
  browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
  dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
  freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
  gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
  geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
  gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
  gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
  gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
  gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
  gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
  gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
  gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
  libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
  libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
  libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
  libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
  libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
  libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
  libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
  libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
  libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
  libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
  libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
  libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
  libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
  libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
  libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
  libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
  libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
  libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
  libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
  libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
  libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
  libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
  libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
  mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
  nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
  openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
  python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
  python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
  python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
  python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
  python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
  python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
  python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
  python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
  python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
  python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
  python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
  python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
  python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
  remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
  rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
  software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
  telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
  totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
  transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
  zip
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
  epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
  fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
  gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
  gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
  gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
  guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
  libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
  libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
  libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
  libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
  libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
  libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
  libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
  libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
  libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
  libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
  libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
  libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
  libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
  libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
  libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
  libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
  libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
  libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
  libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
  libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
  sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
  totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
[nothing]
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This is for KDE:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
  edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
  ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
  gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
  kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
  kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
  kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
  kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
  kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
  kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
  kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
  kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
  killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
  kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
  ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
  libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
  libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
  libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
  libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
  libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
  libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
  libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
  libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
  libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
  lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
  openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
  parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
  pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
  speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
  ttf-sazanami-gothic
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
  dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
  kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
  kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
  keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
  kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
  kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
  klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
  kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
  kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
  kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
  ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
  ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
  kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
  kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
  libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
  libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
  libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
  libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
  libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
  libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
  libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
  libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
  libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
  libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
  libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
  libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
  libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
  libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
  libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
  mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
  texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
  ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
  kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
  kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
  kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
  netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
  xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
  xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 20 Nov 2010 07:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Answering
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html&quot;&gt;the
call from the Gnash project&lt;/a&gt; for
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnashdev.org:8010&quot;&gt;buildbot&lt;/a&gt; slaves to test the
current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
releases out more often.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
I have considered setting up a &lt;a
href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/&quot;&gt;Debian/kfreebsd&lt;/a&gt;
machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian in 3D</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 9 Nov 2010 16:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
3D linked in from
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/&quot;&gt;the
thingiverse blog&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Making room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_room_on_the_Debian_Edu_Sqeeze_DVD.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_room_on_the_Debian_Edu_Sqeeze_DVD.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 7 Nov 2010 11:45:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; DVD, which is
supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard.  Even
schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
working using this DVD.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
installing recommended packages by default.  We want the same set of
packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD.  I created
a patch for debian-cd in &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/601203&quot;&gt;BTS
report #601203&lt;/a&gt; to do this, and since this change was applied to
the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
Debian archive.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
were using most space.  A few large packages are well know;
openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont.  But I also
discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
documentation.  Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
free X driver should work.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
DVD more useful again.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Software updates 2010-10-24</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 24 Oct 2010 22:45:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Some updates.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2&quot;&gt;gnash pledge&lt;/a&gt; to
raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
:)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
It is called
&lt;a href=&quot;http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html&quot;&gt;kcov&lt;/a&gt;,
and can be used using &lt;tt&gt;kcov &amp;lt;directory&amp;gt; &amp;lt;binary&amp;gt;&lt;/tt&gt;.
It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for &lt;a
href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html&quot;&gt;a
new alpha release of Debian Edu&lt;/a&gt;, and just published the second
alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;
release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
clients to get a Linux desktop on request.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Pledge for funding to the Gnash project to get AVM2 support</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pledge_for_funding_to_the_Gnash_project_to_get_AVM2_support.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pledge_for_funding_to_the_Gnash_project_to_get_AVM2_support.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 19 Oct 2010 14:45:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.getgnash.org/&quot;&gt;The Gnash project&lt;/a&gt; is the
most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
funding has dried up.  I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
AVM2 flash files.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2&quot;&gt;a pledge&lt;/a&gt; with the
following text:&lt;/P&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;

  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I will pay 100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
  only if 10 other people will do the same.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;

  &lt;p&gt;- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer&lt;/p&gt;

  &lt;p&gt;Deadline to sign up by: 24th December 2010&lt;/p&gt;

  &lt;p&gt;The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
  format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
  web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
  format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
  days. The project web page is available from
  http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
  of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
  the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.&lt;/p&gt;

  &lt;p&gt;The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
  time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
  to get this to happen.&lt;/p&gt;

  &lt;p&gt;The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32&quot;&gt;http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I hope you will support this effort too.  I hope more than 10
people will participate to make this happen.  The more money the
project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
:)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>First version of a Perl library to control the Spykee robot</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_version_of_a_Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_version_of_a_Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 9 Oct 2010 14:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
I&#39;ve started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
robots.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them.  There are
a few less important features too.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
but I never got around to releasing the current source.  I decided
today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
published the source and deb.  If you got a spykee robot, grab the
source or binary package:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian/packages/lenny/libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.tar.gz&quot;&gt;libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.tar.gz&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian/packages/lenny/libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.dsc&quot;&gt;libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.dsc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian/packages/lenny/libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1_all.deb&quot;&gt;libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1_all.deb&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
please let me know.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Links for 2010-10-03</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 3 Oct 2010 22:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/09/there-is-no-plan-b-why-the-ipv4-to-ipv6-transition-will-be-ugly.ars&quot;&gt;There
is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Scanner looking under clothes
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/10/03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/13667192/&quot;&gt;has
already been misused at Heathrow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell&quot;&gt;Landell
Webcasting&lt;/a&gt; - interesting alternative for
&lt;ahref=&quot;http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/&quot;&gt;DVSwitch&lt;/a&gt; with
simple setup.

&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Terms of use for video produced by a Canon IXUS 130 digital camera</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 9 Sep 2010 23:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
camera, a Canon IXUS 130.  It was instructive and very disturbing to
be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway.  What is the
problem, you might ask?  It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the
MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
without asking for permissions that is at risk.

&lt;p&gt;On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
written:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;This product is licensed under AT&amp;T patents for the MPEG-4 standard
and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding
MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and
non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the
AT&amp;T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4
standard.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
(MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
read
&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA&quot;&gt;Why
Our Civilization&#39;s Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
MPEG-LA&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://webmink.com/2010/09/03/h-264-and-foss/&quot;&gt;H.264 Is Not
The Sort Of Free That Matters&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Simon Phipps to learn more about
the issue.  The solution is to support the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition&quot;&gt;free and
open standards&lt;/a&gt; for video, like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theora.org/&quot;&gt;Ogg
Theora&lt;/a&gt;, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Some notes on Flash in Debian and Debian Edu</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 4 Sep 2010 10:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote&quot;&gt;Debian
popularity-contest numbers&lt;/a&gt;, the adobe-flashplugin package the
second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
installed.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
(«&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&amp;do=view&amp;target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf&quot;&gt;Skolelinux
i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs&lt;/a&gt;»), one of the most important problems
schools experienced with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian
Edu/Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
good reason to stay with Windows.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
pages they want to visit.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
accept the new package into Squeeze.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>My first perl GUI application - controlling a Spykee robot</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_first_perl_GUI_application___controlling_a_Spykee_robot.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_first_perl_GUI_application___controlling_a_Spykee_robot.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 1 Sep 2010 21:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
allow me to drive the robot around.  I picked PerlQt as I have had
positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
browsing the web for examples.  Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
libqt-perl.  Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
drive around.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
controlling the robot.  Here is an small example on how to use it:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
use Spykee;
Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
my $spykee = Spykee-&gt;new();
$spykee-&gt;contact($host, &quot;admin&quot;, &quot;admin&quot;);
$spykee-&gt;left();
sleep 2;
$spykee-&gt;right();
sleep 2;
$spykee-&gt;forward();
sleep 2;
$spykee-&gt;back();
sleep 2;
$spykee-&gt;stop();
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
implement the protocol used by the robot.  I&#39;ve implemented several of
the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
support to make it possible to control the robot from remote.  First I
want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
going. :).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
where to make it available first.  I will add a link to 
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/&quot;&gt;the NUUG wiki&lt;/a&gt; for
those that want to check back later to find it.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Broken hard link handling with sshfs</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 30 Aug 2010 19:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html&quot;&gt;previous
post about sshfs&lt;/a&gt;.  He reported another problem with sshfs.  It
fail to handle hard links properly.  A simple way to spot this is to
look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree.  These should have
a link count &gt;1, but on sshfs the count is 1.  I just tested to see
what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
% ln foo bar
ln: creating hard link `bar&#39; =&gt; `foo&#39;: Function not implemented
%
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
avoid surprised unix programs.  Not as useful as working file locking
and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
nevertheless. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The latest version of the file system test code is available via
git from
&lt;a href=&quot;http://github.com/gebi/fs-test&quot;&gt;http://github.com/gebi/fs-test&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Broken umask handling with sshfs</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;My file system sematics program
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html&quot;&gt;presented
a few days ago&lt;/a&gt; is very useful to verify that a file system can
work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit.  I&#39;m
looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs.  My friend
Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
Edu, but stopped because of problems.  I asked today what the problems
where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
script:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
  mode_t retval = 0;
  int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
  if (-1 != fd) {
    unlink(name);
    struct stat statbuf;
    if (-1 != fstat(fd, &amp;statbuf)) {
      retval = statbuf.st_mode &amp; 0x1ff;
    }
    close(fd);
  }
  return retval;
}

/* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
int test_umask(void) {
  printf(&quot;info: testing umask effect on file creation\n&quot;);

  mode_t orig_umask = umask(000);
  mode_t newmode;
  if (0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode(&quot;foobar&quot;, 0666))) {
    printf(&quot;  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 000\n&quot;,
           newmode);
  }
  umask(007);
  if (0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode(&quot;foobar&quot;, 0666))) {
    printf(&quot;  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 007\n&quot;,
           newmode);
  }

  umask (orig_umask);
  return 0;
}

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  [...]
  test_umask();
  return 0;
}
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Sure enough.  On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
info: testing symlink creation
info: testing subdirectory creation
info: testing fcntl locking
  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
info: testing umask effect on file creation
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
result:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
info: testing symlink creation
info: testing subdirectory creation
info: testing fcntl locking
  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
info: testing umask effect on file creation
  error: Wrong file mode 644 when creating using mode 666 and umask 000
  error: Wrong file mode 640 when creating using mode 666 and umask 007
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
directory.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2010-08-26: Reported the issue in
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/594498&quot;&gt;BTS report #594498&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
&lt;a href=&quot;http://github.com/gebi/fs-test&quot;&gt;http://github.com/gebi/fs-test&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 15 Aug 2010 22:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I found the notes from Rob Weir on
&lt;a href=&quot;http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html&quot;&gt;how
to crush dissent&lt;/a&gt; matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
well.  Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
should go down.  In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
long time.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 9 Aug 2010 20:15:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
configuration settings on the clients.  I believe the work to be
mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
generated configuration.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;What is the point, you might ask?  The point is to allow a Debian
Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
without any manual configuration.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
the University of Oslo using PXE.  With the PXE installation, I am
asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret).  After answering
these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
after around 50 minutes it is done.  I press enter to finish the
installation, and the machine reboots into KDE.  When the machine is
ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop.  At no point during
this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
required configuration was dynamically detected using information
fetched via DHCP and DNS.  The roaming workstation is now ready for
use.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;How was this done, you might wonder?  First of all, here is the
list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
working properly out of the box:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;IP address/netmask and DNS server.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Web proxy URL.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Kerberos server for PAM password checking.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;(Hm, did I forget anything?  Let me knew if I did.)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
administrators to track their machines.  Since yesterday, everything
but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
/etc/apt/apt.conf.  I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
proxy present on the new network when it moves around.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
configuration are generated using DNS information at boot.  First the
installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain.  If
not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead.  If an
LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
determine which LDAP base to use for NSS.  If there are several
namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
LDAP subtree is used as the base.  If defaultNamingContext is missing,
the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
such an object is used as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record.  I&#39;ve been unable to find a way to
look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
current DNS domain is used.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
found.  This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
Oslo.  A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
server, but have not been implemented yet.  I decided to fetch and
save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
log in nor the passwords required to log in.  Usernames and passwords
will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
network, and will not change as the laptop move around.  For a
non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
supposed to stay in place it should not matter much.  Perhaps we
should switch those to use sssd too?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The user&#39;s SMB mount point for the network home directory is
located when the user logs in for the first time.  The LDAP server is
consulted to look for the user&#39;s LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
attribute is used if found.  If it isn&#39;t found, the home directory
path fetched from NSS is used instead.  Assuming the path is of the
form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
smb://server.domain/username.  This algorithm works for both Debian
edu and the University of Oslo.  Perhaps there are better attributes
to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
do for now. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
more flexible than before.  I suspect it will also work for thin
client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
yet.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name.  Will have to
implement it for Debian Edu. :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Testing if a file system can be used for home directories...</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 8 Aug 2010 21:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
Edu/Skolelinux machines.  This was thought to be no problem, as the
access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
mount home directories without any problems.  But, after months of
struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
underlying file system is a unix file system.  When using a Windows
file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
it should.  If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
help you find your way out again.  This is the fs-test.c source:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
/*
 * Some tests to check the file system sematics.  Used to verify that
 * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
 * directory.
 * License: GPL v2 or later
 * 
 * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
 * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
*/

#define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
#define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
#define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1

#define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */

#include &amp;lt;errno.h&gt;
#include &amp;lt;fcntl.h&gt;
#include &amp;lt;stdio.h&gt;
#include &amp;lt;string.h&gt;
#include &amp;lt;stdlib.h&gt;
#include &amp;lt;sys/file.h&gt;
#include &amp;lt;sys/stat.h&gt;
#include &amp;lt;sys/types.h&gt;
#include &amp;lt;unistd.h&gt;

#ifdef TEST_SQLITE
/*
 * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
 * package and linking with -lsqlite3.  A more low level test is
 * below.
 * See also &amp;lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 &gt;.
 */
#include &amp;lt;sqlite3.h&gt;
#define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
  &quot;CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); &quot;
int test_sqlite_open(void) {
  char *zErrMsg;
  char *name = &quot;testsqlite.db&quot;;
  sqlite3 *db=NULL;
  unlink(name);
  int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &amp;db);
  if( rc ){
    printf(&quot;error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n&quot;, name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
    sqlite3_close(db);
    return -1;
  }

  /* create tables */
  rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &amp;zErrMsg);
  if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
    printf(&quot;error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n&quot;, zErrMsg);
    sqlite3_close(db);
    return -1;
  }
  printf(&quot;info: sqlite worked\n&quot;);
  sqlite3_close(db);
  return 0;
}
#endif /* TEST_SQLITE */

/*
 * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3.  This
 * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003.  This is
 * done in the sqlite3 library.
 * See also
 * &amp;lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html&gt; and the
 * POSIX specification
 * &amp;lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html&gt;.
 */
int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
  struct flock fl;
  char *name = &quot;testsqlite.db&quot;;
  unlink(name);
  int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
  printf(&quot;info: testing fcntl locking\n&quot;);

  fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
  fl.l_pid    = getpid();
  printf(&quot;  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824&quot;);
  fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
  fl.l_len    = 1;
  fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
  if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &amp;fl) ) printf(&quot; - error!\n&quot;); else printf(&quot;\n&quot;);

  printf(&quot;  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826&quot;);
  fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
  fl.l_len    = 510;
  fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
  if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &amp;fl) ) printf(&quot; - error!\n&quot;); else printf(&quot;\n&quot;);

  printf(&quot;  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824&quot;);
  fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
  fl.l_len    = 1;
  fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
  if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &amp;fl) ) printf(&quot; - error!\n&quot;); else printf(&quot;\n&quot;);

  printf(&quot;  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824&quot;);
  fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
  fl.l_len    = 1;
  fl.l_type   = F_WRLCK;
  if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &amp;fl) ) printf(&quot; - error!\n&quot;); else printf(&quot;\n&quot;);

  printf(&quot;  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826&quot;);
  fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
  fl.l_len    = 510;
  if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &amp;fl) ) printf(&quot; - error!\n&quot;); else printf(&quot;\n&quot;);

  printf(&quot;  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824&quot;);
  fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
  fl.l_len    = 2;
  fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
  if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &amp;fl) ) printf(&quot; - error!\n&quot;); else printf(&quot;\n&quot;);

  close(fd);
  return 0;
}

/*
 * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
 * below them.  This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
 * Mounting with option &#39;sync&#39; seem to solve this problem while
 * slowing down file operations.
 */
int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
#define LEVELS 5
  char *path = strdup(&quot;test&quot;);
  char *dirs[LEVELS];
  int level;
  printf(&quot;info: testing subdirectory creation\n&quot;);
  for (level = 0; level &amp;lt; LEVELS; level++) {
    char *newpath = NULL;
    if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
      printf(&quot;  error: Unable to create directory &#39;%s&#39;: %s\n&quot;,
             path, strerror(errno));
      break;
    }
    asprintf(&amp;newpath, &quot;%s/%s&quot;, path, &quot;test&quot;);
    free(path);
    path = newpath;
  }
  return 0;
}

/*
 * Test if symlinks can be created.  This was a problem detected with
 * KDE.
 */
int test_symlinks(void) {
  printf(&quot;info: testing symlink creation\n&quot;);
  unlink(&quot;symlink&quot;);
  if (-1 == symlink(&quot;file&quot;, &quot;symlink&quot;))
    printf(&quot;  error: Unable to create symlink\n&quot;);
  return 0;
}

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  printf(&quot;Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n&quot;);
  test_symlinks();
  test_subdirectory_creation();
#ifdef TEST_SQLITE
  test_sqlite_open();
#endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
  test_gcompris_locking();
  return 0;
}
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;When everything is working, it should print something like
this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
info: testing symlink creation
info: testing subdirectory creation
info: sqlite worked
info: testing fcntl locking
  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
the read-only lock (while Windows do not).  Another was a bug in the
CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
it. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
&lt;a href=&quot;http://github.com/gebi/fs-test&quot;&gt;http://github.com/gebi/fs-test&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Autodetecting Client setup for roaming workstations in Debian Edu</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Autodetecting_Client_setup_for_roaming_workstations_in_Debian_Edu.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Autodetecting_Client_setup_for_roaming_workstations_in_Debian_Edu.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 7 Aug 2010 14:45:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;A few days ago, I
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html&quot;&gt;tried
to install&lt;/a&gt; a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
university infrastructure.  It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
around it.  Now I am a huge step further along that road.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
servers for Kerberos authentication.  All this without any
configuration at all during installation.  My users home directory got
a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured.  In addition to
this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
/etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf.  Iceweasel and KDE is
configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
a proxy when at the university network.  If the machine is moved to a
network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
gave it a IP address.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
entry ldap.$domain.  If this do not exist, it look for the
_ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
server.  Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
pick the first one as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
uppercase version of $domain.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;So, what is not working, you might ask.  SMB mounting my home
directory do not work.  No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
the cause.  These are not properly configured during installation, and
had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
but SMB mounting still do not work. :(&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
authentication.  It should also work out of the box in a Active
Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
with UID and GID values.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu roaming workstation - at the university of Oslo</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 3 Aug 2010 23:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
infrastructure.  In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
servers.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
/etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
(/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
.uio.no.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
university servers.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
uses.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 27 Jul 2010 23:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I discovered this while doing
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html&quot;&gt;automated
testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze&lt;/a&gt;.  A few packages
in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;An example is from todays
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt&quot;&gt;upgrade
of KDE using aptitude&lt;/a&gt;.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
because its dependencies are unavailable.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
 perl-modules depends on perl (&gt;= 5.10.1-1); however:
  Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/527917&quot;&gt;reported as a bug&lt;/a&gt;, and will
hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
of dependency loops.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Thanks to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html&quot;&gt;the
tireless effort by Bill Allombert&lt;/a&gt;, the number of circular
dependencies
&lt;a href=&quot;http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html&quot;&gt;left in Debian
is dropping&lt;/a&gt;, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Todays testing also exposed a bug in
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/590605&quot;&gt;update-notifier&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/590604&quot;&gt;different behaviour&lt;/a&gt; between
apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
it.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>First Debian Edu test release (alpha0) based on Squeeze is released</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu_test_release__alpha0__based_on_Squeeze_is_released.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu_test_release__alpha0__based_on_Squeeze_is_released.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:45:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
with the next Debian Edu release.  Not nearly done, but one major step
completed.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
language of choice, please let us know too.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
much.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Changes compared to the lenny based version&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Everything from Debian Squeeze
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Desktop environment KDE 4.4 =&gt; the new KDE desktop in
         combination with some new artwork
  &lt;li&gt;Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
  &lt;li&gt;OpenOffice.org 3.2
  &lt;li&gt;Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
  &lt;li&gt;Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
  &lt;li&gt;Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
  &lt;li&gt;Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
  &lt;li&gt;Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
  &lt;li&gt;3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
  &lt;li&gt;Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
    Enabled for:
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;PAM
  &lt;li&gt;LDAP
  &lt;li&gt;IMAP
  &lt;li&gt;SMTP (sender verification)
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
    fetched from LDAP.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;General cleanup (not finished)&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The following features are not working as they should&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
    scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
    for testing.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
    and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
    clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
    netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
    some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
    jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Some packages lack translations. See
    http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
    and help out with translations.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso&quot;&gt;ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso&quot;&gt;http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;To download this multiarch dvd release you can use&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso&quot;&gt;ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso&quot;&gt;http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
get closer to the final release.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The MD5SUM of these images are&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The SHA1SUM of these images are&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;How to report bugs:
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>One step closer to single signon in Debian Edu</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_step_closer_to_single_signon_in_Debian_Edu.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_step_closer_to_single_signon_in_Debian_Edu.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 25 Jul 2010 10:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
Edu/Skolelinux into shape.  This future version will use Kerberos for
authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
getting rid of password questions one at the time.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
to gain access to the users home directory on the file server.  This
shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
package.  I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
password when mounting the SMB volume.  A simple click on the shortcut
in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
up. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
Debian Edu.  We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
also Samba.  Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
the release.  It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
time for a alpha0 release today.  As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
release another day.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>OpenStreetmap one step closer to having routing on its front page</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenStreetmap_one_step_closer_to_having_routing_on_its_front_page.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenStreetmap_one_step_closer_to_having_routing_on_its_front_page.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 18 Jul 2010 16:45:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Thanks to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home&quot;&gt;todays
opengeodata blog entry&lt;/a&gt;, I just discovered that the
OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
&lt;a href=&quot;http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT&quot;&gt;support
for calculating routes&lt;/a&gt;.  The support is still experimental and
only available from the development server, until more experience is
gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
was provided by &lt;a href=&quot;http://maps.cloudmade.com/&quot;&gt;Cloudmade&lt;/a&gt;,
but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
the issue.  I&#39;ve had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
www.openstreetmap.org front page.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>What are they searching for - PowerDNS and ISC DHCP in LDAP</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 17 Jul 2010 21:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;This is a
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html&quot;&gt;followup&lt;/a&gt;
on my
&lt;a href=&quot;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&quot;&gt;previous
work&lt;/a&gt; on
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html&quot;&gt;merging
all&lt;/a&gt; the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.&lt;/p&gt;

To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;powerdns&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend&quot;&gt;Clues
on how to&lt;/a&gt; set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
the web.

&lt;p&gt;PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
One &quot;strict&quot; mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
using the same LDAP objects, and a &quot;tree&quot; mode where the forward and
reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
base, and uses a &quot;base&quot; scoped search for the DNS name by adding
&quot;dc=tjener,dc=intern,&quot; to the base with a filter for
&quot;(associateddomain=tjener.intern)&quot; for the forward entry and
&quot;dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,&quot; with a filter for
&quot;(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)&quot; for the reverse entry.  For
forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
ldapsearch commands could look like this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
ldapsearch -h ldap \
  -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
  -s base -x &#39;(associateddomain=tjener.intern)&#39; dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
  cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
  rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
  nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
  rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp

ldapsearch -h ldap \
  -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
  -s base -x &#39;(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)&#39;
  dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
  hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
  srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
also exist.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
objectclass: top
objectclass: dnsdomain
objectclass: domainrelatedobject
dc: tjener
arecord: 10.0.2.2
associateddomain: tjener.intern

dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
objectclass: top
objectclass: dnsdomain2
objectclass: domainrelatedobject
dc: 2
ptrrecord: tjener.intern
associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
forward DNS entries, it is doing a &quot;subtree&quot; scoped search with the
same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
&quot;(associateddomain=tjener.intern)&quot; and requests the attributes dnsttl,
arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
subtree scoped search but this time the filter is &quot;(arecord=10.0.2.2)&quot;
and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
instead.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
like this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
  &#39;(associateddomain=tjener.intern)&#39; dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
  cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
  rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
  nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
  rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp

ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
  &#39;(arecord=10.0.2.2)&#39; associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
reverse lookups.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
objectclass that provide the needed attributes.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
classes with the object classes used by DHCP.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
(zonename and relativedomainname).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
objectclass ( some-oid NAME &#39;dnsDomainAux&#39;
    SUP top
    AUXILIARY
    MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
          DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
          TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
          NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
          A6Record $ DNAMERecord
    ))
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I&#39;ve sent an email to the PowerDNS
developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ISC dhcp&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
what is needed without having to read the source code.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
stored.  These are the relevant entries from
/etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
ldap-base-dn &quot;dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no&quot;;
ldap-dhcp-server-cn &quot;dhcp&quot;;
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
configuration it need.  The cn &quot;dhcp&quot; is located using the given LDAP
base and the filter &quot;(&amp;(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))&quot;.  The
search result is this entry:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
cn: dhcp
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpServer
dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
is located using a base scope search with base &quot;cn=DHCP
Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no&quot; and filter
&quot;(&amp;(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))&quot;.
The search result is this entry:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
cn: DHCP Config
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpService
objectClass: dhcpOptions
dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
dhcpStatements: authoritative
dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
related computer objects.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
scoped search with &quot;cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no&quot; as
the base and &quot;(&amp;(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
00:00:00:00:00:00))&quot; as the filter.  This is what a host object look
like:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
cn: hostname
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpHost
dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
structural object class.

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its &quot;tree&quot; mode is rigid when it
come to the the LDAP structure, the &quot;strict&quot; mode is very flexible,
allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
in the configuration.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
structure.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
this might work for Debian Edu:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
ou=services
  cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
    cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
    cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
      cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
        cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
    cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
      cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
        cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
    ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
      cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;P&gt;This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
like this:&lt;/p&gt;
    
&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
dc: hostname
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpHost
objectclass: domainrelatedobject
objectclass: dnsDomainAux
associateddomain: hostname.intern
arecord: 10.11.12.13
dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;/p&gt;One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
auxiliary object class.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:45:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&#39;ve looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
information finally found a solution that seem to work.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
to a slave DNS server.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
I&#39;ve written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
seem to work.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
  dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
  cn: hostname
  objectClass: dhcphost
  objectclass: domainrelatedobject
  objectclass: dnsdomainaux
  associateddomain: hostname.intern
  arecord: 10.11.12.13
  dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
  dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
  ldapconfigsound: Y
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
outside the &quot;DHCP Config&quot; subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
that.  If I can&#39;t figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
(which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
might be a good place to put it.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 11 Jul 2010 22:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
LTSP clients.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
in a &quot;computer&quot; LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
# Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
#
# Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
#
# Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
# the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
# ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
#
# This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
# existence of attribute names.
#
# The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
# ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
# To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
#
# Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
# configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
# 
# objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME &#39;ltspClientAux&#39;
#     SUP top
#     AUXILIARY
#     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )

LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
if [ &quot;$LDAPSERVER&quot; ] ; then
    LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
    for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk &#39;{print $5}&#39;|sort -u) ; do
        filter=&quot;(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))&quot;
        ldapsearch -h &quot;$LDAPSERVER&quot; -b &quot;$LDAPBASE&quot; -v -x &quot;$filter&quot; | \
            grep &#39;^ltspConfig&#39; | while read attr value ; do
            # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
            attr=$(echo $attr | sed &#39;s/^ltspConfig//i&#39; | tr a-z A-Z)
            # bass value on to clients
            eval &quot;$attr=$value; export $attr&quot;
        done
    done
fi
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html&quot;&gt;PC
Xperience, Inc., 2000&lt;/a&gt;.  I found its
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/&quot;&gt;files&lt;/a&gt; on a
personal home page over at redhat.com.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 9 Jul 2010 12:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Since
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html&quot;&gt;my
last post&lt;/a&gt; about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
&lt;a href=&quot;http://jxplorer.org/&quot;&gt;jXplorer&lt;/a&gt; is claimed to be capable of
moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html&quot;&gt;available in
Debian&lt;/a&gt; testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Lenny-&gt;Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 3 Jul 2010 23:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Here is a short update on my &lt;a
href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/&quot;&gt;my
Debian Lenny-&gt;Squeeze upgrade testing&lt;/a&gt;.  Here is a summary of the
difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I&#39;m
not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
aptitude try because of missing conflicts
(&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/584861&quot;&gt;#584861&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/585716&quot;&gt;#585716&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
publish the difference.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
  libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
  libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
  libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
  libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
  libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
  python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
  python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
  gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
  libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
  libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
  libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
  libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
  libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
  libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
  libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
  libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
  libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
  libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
  libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
  libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
  libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
  libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
  libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
  libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
  libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
  mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
  python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
  xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
  xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
  xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
  xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
  xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
  xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
  xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
  xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
  xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
  xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
  xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
  xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
  xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
  xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
  xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
  xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
  xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
  xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
  xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
  xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
  xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
&lt;a href=&quot;http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120&quot;&gt;changed
in git&lt;/a&gt; today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
the difference somewhat.
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Caching password, user and group on a roaming Debian laptop</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Caching_password__user_and_group_on_a_roaming_Debian_laptop.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Caching_password__user_and_group_on_a_roaming_Debian_laptop.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 1 Jul 2010 11:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
a bit troubling.  Laptops are typically used also when not connected
to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
in Debian.  Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2&gt;LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir&lt;/h2&gt;

This is the traditional method with a twist.  The password caching is
provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd.  The directory
lookup and password checking is done using LDAP.  If one want to use
Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal.  If one is happy having a
local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
using libpam-mklocaluser.  A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/568577&quot;&gt;bug #568577&lt;/a&gt; is in the
archive.  Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/.  This
is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;These packages need to be installed and configured&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site.  Make sure the
PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
sent in clear text to the LDAP server.  I&#39;ve been unable to get TLS
certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
on how to get this working.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
caching until &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/485282&quot;&gt;bug #485282&lt;/a&gt;
is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
currently in /etc/nscd.conf.  The changes are in the fields
reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
instructions I found in the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/&quot;&gt;LDAP for Mobile Laptops&lt;/a&gt;
instructions by Flyn Computing.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
        debug-level             0
        reload-count            unlimited
        paranoia                no

        enable-cache            passwd          yes
        positive-time-to-live   passwd          2592000
        negative-time-to-live   passwd          20
        suggested-size          passwd          211
        check-files             passwd          yes
        persistent              passwd          yes
        shared                  passwd          yes
        max-db-size             passwd          33554432
        auto-propagate          passwd          yes

        enable-cache            group           yes
        positive-time-to-live   group           2592000
        negative-time-to-live   group           20
        suggested-size          group           211
        check-files             group           yes
        persistent              group           yes
        shared                  group           yes
        max-db-size             group           33554432
        auto-propagate          group           yes

        enable-cache            hosts           no
        positive-time-to-live   hosts           2592000
        negative-time-to-live   hosts           20
        suggested-size          hosts           211
        check-files             hosts           yes
        persistent              hosts           yes
        shared                  hosts           yes
        max-db-size             hosts           33554432

        enable-cache            services        yes
        positive-time-to-live   services        2592000
        negative-time-to-live   services        20
        suggested-size          services        211
        check-files             services        yes
        persistent              services        yes
        shared                  services        yes
        max-db-size             services        33554432
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
automatically like the one provided in
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/496915&quot;&gt;bug #496915&lt;/a&gt;, the file
content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
directory service on the machine.  /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
look like this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
passwd:         files ldap
group:          files ldap
shadow:         files ldap
hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
networks:       files
protocols:      files
services:       files
ethers:         files
rpc:            files
netgroup:       files ldap
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
shadow and netgroup.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
directory created and have the password as well as user and group
attributes cached.

&lt;h2&gt;LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
  libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
problems doing proper caching, I&#39;ve seen suggestions and recipes to
use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
LDAP database is available.  I have not tested such setup, because I
discovered sssd.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2&gt;LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
&lt;a href=&quot;https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/&quot;&gt;sssd&lt;/a&gt; package from Redhat.
It is part of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.freeipa.org/&quot;&gt;FreeIPA&lt;/A&gt; project
to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
machines.  The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
libpam-ccreds.  It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS.  Version
1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010.  Because the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html&quot;&gt;sssd package&lt;/a&gt;
was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
version 1.2 is now in testing.

&lt;p&gt;These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
roaming setup I want&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
&lt;tt&gt;/etc/sssd/sssd.conf&lt;/tt&gt;.

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
[sssd]
config_file_version = 2
reconnection_retries = 3
sbus_timeout = 30
services = nss, pam
domains = INTERN

[nss]
filter_groups = root
filter_users = root
reconnection_retries = 3

[pam]
reconnection_retries = 3

[domain/INTERN]
enumerate = false
cache_credentials = true

id_provider = ldap
auth_provider = ldap
chpass_provider = ldap

ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
ldap_tls_reqcert = never
ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I got the same problem here with certificate checking.  Had to set
&quot;ldap_tls_reqcert = never&quot; to get it working.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
modify it manually.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://luma.sourceforge.net/&quot;&gt;LUMA&lt;/a&gt;, which has proved to
be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
released.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/&quot;&gt;ldapvi&lt;/a&gt; for that.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html&quot;&gt;gq&lt;/a&gt; package as a
useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Idea for a change to LDAP schemas allowing DNS and DHCP info to be combined into one object</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 24 Jun 2010 00:35:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;A while back, I
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html&quot;&gt;complained
about the fact&lt;/a&gt; that it is not possible with the provided schemas
for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
Debian Edu.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00&quot;&gt;DHCP
schema&lt;/a&gt; to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
available today from IETF.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
--- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
+++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
@@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
 objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
        NAME &#39;dhcpHost&#39;
        DESC &#39;This represents information about a particular client&#39;
-       SUP top
+       SUP top AUXILIARY
        MUST cn
        MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
        X-NDS_CONTAINMENT (&#39;dhcpService&#39; &#39;dhcpSubnet&#39; &#39;dhcpGroup&#39;) )
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
this:

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
tasksel --new-install
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
any output what so ever.

Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
code like this:

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
cmd=&quot;$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed &#39;s/debconf-apt-progress -- //&#39;)&quot;
$cmd
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The content of $cmd is typically something like &quot;&lt;tt&gt;aptitude -q
--without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
~pimportant&lt;/tt&gt;&quot;, which will install the gnome desktop task, the
laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
important, just like tasksel would have done it during
installation.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
like this.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Officeshots taking shape</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 13 Jun 2010 11:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;For those of us caring about document exchange and
interoperability, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.officeshots.org/&quot;&gt;OfficeShots&lt;/a&gt;
is a great service.  It is to ODF documents what
&lt;a href=&quot;http://browsershots.org/&quot;&gt;BrowserShots&lt;/a&gt; is for web
pages.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
interested in supporting the project.  I helped him to navigate his
request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot.  The machine is
administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
see how the project is doing.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
in 17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
Windows.  This is great.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Lenny-&gt;Squeeze upgrades, removals by apt and aptitude</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 13 Jun 2010 09:05:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;My
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html&quot;&gt;testing
of Debian upgrades&lt;/a&gt; from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I&#39;ve
finally made the upgrade logs available from
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/&quot;&gt;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/&lt;/a&gt;.
I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
I will only focus on their removal plans.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
too surprising.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
&#39;&lt;tt&gt;echo &gt;&gt; /proc/&lt;em&gt;pidofdpkg&lt;/em&gt;/fd/0&lt;/tt&gt;&#39; to tell dpkg to
continue.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;apt-get gnome 72&lt;/b&gt;
&lt;br&gt;bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
  gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
  iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
  libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
  nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
  serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
  xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
  xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
  xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
  xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
  xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
  xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
  xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
  xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
  xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
  xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
  xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
  xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
  xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
  xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
  xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
  xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
  xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
  xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
  xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
  xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
  xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
  xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
  xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;aptitude gnome 129&lt;/b&gt;

&lt;br&gt;bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
  djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
  gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
  gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
  libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
  libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
  libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
  libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
  libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
  libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
  libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
  libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
  libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
  libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
  libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
  libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
  libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
  libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
  libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
  libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
  libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
  libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
  libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
  libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
  openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
  python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
  python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
  python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
  swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
  xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
  xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
  zip&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;apt-get kde 82&lt;/b&gt;

&lt;br&gt;cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
  kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
  kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
  kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
  kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
  libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
  xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
  xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
  xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
  xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
  xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
  xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
  xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
  xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
  xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
  xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
  xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
  xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
  xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
  xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
  xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
  xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
  xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
  xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
  xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
  xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
  xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
  xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;aptitude kde 192&lt;/b&gt;
&lt;br&gt;bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
  djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
  ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
  kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
  kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
  kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
  kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
  kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
  kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
  kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
  kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
  klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
  kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
  krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
  ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
  kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
  kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
  libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
  libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
  libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
  libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
  libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
  libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
  libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
  libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
  libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
  libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
  libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
  libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
  libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
  libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
  openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
  superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
  texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
  xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
  xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
  xulrunner-1.9&lt;/p&gt;

</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 11 Jun 2010 22:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
have been discovered and reported in the process
(&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/585410&quot;&gt;#585410&lt;/a&gt; in nagios3-cgi,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/584879&quot;&gt;#584879&lt;/a&gt; already fixed in
enscript and &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/584861&quot;&gt;#584861&lt;/a&gt; in
kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
am working on a script to automate the test.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
(only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
is created.  The bug report
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/566000&quot;&gt;#566000&lt;/a&gt; make me suspect
this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/&quot;&gt;known
issue&lt;/a&gt; and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
Debian Squeeze.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
script, which I call &lt;tt&gt;upgrade-test&lt;/tt&gt; for now, is doing the
trick:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
#!/bin/sh
set -ex

if [ &quot;$1&quot; ] ; then
    desktop=$1
else
    desktop=gnome
fi

from=lenny
to=squeeze

exec &amp;lt; /dev/null
unset LANG
mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
fuser -mv .
debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
cat &gt; $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &amp;lt;&amp;lt;EOF
#!/bin/sh
exit 101
EOF
chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
exit_cleanup() {
    umount $tmpdir/proc
}
mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
# Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT

chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils

# Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
# to return the correct answers.
echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
    chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections

# Include the desktop and laptop task
for test in desktop laptop ; do
    echo &gt; $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &amp;lt;&amp;lt;EOF
#!/bin/sh
exit 2
EOF
    chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
done

DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install

echo deb $mirror $to main &gt; $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
fuser -mv
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
kdebase-workspace-data&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
(KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
packages.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Upstart or sysvinit - as init.d scripts see it</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 6 Jun 2010 23:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
script is running under upstart, and when it is not.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
COLUMNS):&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
previous=N
PREVLEVEL=
RUNLEVEL=
runlevel=S
UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
UPSTART_INSTANCE=
UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
script.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
previous=N
PREVLEVEL=N
RUNLEVEL=S
runlevel=S
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
choice.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>A manual for standards wars...</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 6 Jun 2010 14:15:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Via the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html&quot;&gt;blog
of Rob Weir&lt;/a&gt; I came across the very interesting essay named
&lt;a href=&quot;http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf&quot;&gt;The Art of
Standards Wars&lt;/a&gt; (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
following the standards wars of today.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Sitesummary tip: Listing computer hardware models used at site</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 3 Jun 2010 12:05:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
the Skolelinux build servers:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
  vendor                    count
  Dell Computer Corporation     1
    PowerEdge 1750              1
  IBM                           1
    eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
  Intel                         2
  [no-dmi-info]                 3
maintainer:~#
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
option to list the individual machines.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A larger list is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/&quot;&gt;available from the the
city of Narvik&lt;/a&gt;, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
collector.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 1 Jun 2010 17:05:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
wait.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I came across two bugs related to this issue,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/583312&quot;&gt;#583312&lt;/a&gt; initially filed
against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/524751&quot;&gt;#524751&lt;/a&gt; initially filed against
kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 27 May 2010 23:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
issues are known and should be solved:

&lt;p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The wicd package seen to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/508289&quot;&gt;break NFS mounting&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/581586&quot;&gt;network setup&lt;/a&gt; when
parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
seem to be on the case.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The nvidia X driver seem to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/583312&quot;&gt;have a race condition&lt;/a&gt;
triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
maintainer is on the case.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/575080&quot;&gt;try to switch back&lt;/a&gt; to
sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
/etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
sysv-rc get a working shutdown.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org&quot;&gt;the
list of usertagged bugs related to this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 22 May 2010 21:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
definitely helped freeing some time.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
/cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
going to work.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
&quot;external&quot; media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
/cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
Edu.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Pieces of the roaming laptop puzzle in Debian</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 19 May 2010 19:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
Edu finally entered the Debian archive.  Today, the new
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html&quot;&gt;libpam-mklocaluser&lt;/a&gt;
package was accepted.  Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
into unstable.  The
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html&quot;&gt;pam-python&lt;/a&gt;
package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html&quot;&gt;sssd&lt;/a&gt; package
passed NEW on Monday.  In addition, the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html&quot;&gt;libpam-ccreds&lt;/a&gt;
package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
roaming laptops.  The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
for nscd in &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/485282&quot;&gt;BTS report
#485282&lt;/a&gt; is implemented.  The alternative setup is to use sssd with
libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
care of the caching of passwords and group information.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
problem with the server certificate.  I plan to update the Debian
package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
find time to make sure the next release will include both the
Debian/Ubuntu specific patches.  Upstream is friendly and responsive,
and I am sure we will find a good solution.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
memberhips and other relevant LDAP information.  The
libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used.  To avoid confusion
with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
on the home directory servers.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
is created.  Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
message.  The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
a bug in gdm.  Have not investigated if there is some other message
type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 14 May 2010 22:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
expected, if I am to believe the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html&quot;&gt;input
on debian-devel@&lt;/a&gt;, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
version.&lt;/p&gt;

More information about
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot&quot;&gt;dependency
based boot sequencing&lt;/a&gt; is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
CONCURRENCY=none
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org&quot;&gt;the
list of usertagged bugs related to this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 14 May 2010 21:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary&quot;&gt;sitesummary
system&lt;/a&gt; is used to keep track of the machines in the school
network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
to update the DHCP configuration.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
this on the collector host:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
perl -MSiteSummary -e &#39;for_all_hosts(sub { print join(&quot; &quot;, get_macaddresses(shift)), &quot;\n&quot;; });&#39;
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
written yet.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 13 May 2010 22:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The last few days a new boot system called
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd&quot;&gt;systemd&lt;/a&gt;
has been
&lt;a href=&quot;http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html&quot;&gt;introduced&lt;/a&gt;

to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://upstart.ubuntu.com/&quot;&gt;upstart&lt;/a&gt;, and might prove to be
a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
based boot system.  Tollef is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/580814&quot;&gt;in the process&lt;/a&gt; of getting
systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
at the moment do not.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
way forward.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In the mean time, based on the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html&quot;&gt;input
on debian-devel@&lt;/a&gt; regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
with parallel booting enabled by default.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Parallellizing the boot in Debian Squeeze - ready for wider testing</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 6 May 2010 23:25:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
to test your Squeeze system, make sure
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot&quot;&gt;dependency
based boot sequencing&lt;/a&gt; is enabled, and add this line to
/etc/default/rcS:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
CONCURRENCY=makefile
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
/etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
/etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
make this happen.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
the package maintainers to fix it. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
fix the remaining issues.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org&quot;&gt;the
list of usertagged bugs related to this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Forcing new users to change their password on first login</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Forcing_new_users_to_change_their_password_on_first_login.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Forcing_new_users_to_change_their_password_on_first_login.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 2 May 2010 13:47:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
change the password on the first login attempt.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account.  The account
and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
settings in /etc/shadow:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
root@tjener:~# chage -l test
Last password change                                    : May 02, 2010
Password expires                                        : never
Password inactive                                       : never
Account expires                                         : never
Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
Maximum number of days between password change          : 99999
Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
root@tjener:~#
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
to the difference in days between that date and today.  To make it
simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
intended:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
root@tjener:~# chage -l test
Last password change                                    : Jan 02, 1970
Password expires                                        : never
Password inactive                                       : never
Account expires                                         : never
Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
Maximum number of days between password change          : 10950
Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
root@tjener:~#  
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
sure only the user itself have the account password?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
on the first login.  This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
I did not notice this in my initial testing.  I have tested it on
Squeeze, and &#39;&lt;tt&gt;chage -d 0 username&lt;/tt&gt;&#39; do work there.  I have not
tested it on Lenny yet.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
equivalent command to expire a password is &#39;&lt;tt&gt;passwd -e
username&lt;/tt&gt;&#39;, which insert zero into the date of the last password
change.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Thoughts on roaming laptop setup for Debian Edu</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thoughts_on_roaming_laptop_setup_for_Debian_Edu.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thoughts_on_roaming_laptop_setup_for_Debian_Edu.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 28 Apr 2010 20:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
Debian Edu.  The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
and go.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
example called Roaming Workstations.  Here are my thought on this.
The setup would consist of the following:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;

 &lt;li&gt;During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
   the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
   the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
   server.  This allow the user to work also when offline.  The
   central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
   request, for example mounted via CIFS.  It could be mounted
   automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
   and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
   hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
   request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
   can be used to access it when needed.  Perhaps it is enough to use
   the fish protocol in KDE?&lt;/li&gt;

 &lt;li&gt;Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
   authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
   to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
   to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server.  This can be done using
   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html&quot;&gt;libpam-ccreds&lt;/a&gt;
   or the Fedora developed
   &lt;a href=&quot;https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD&quot;&gt;System
   Security Services Daemon&lt;/a&gt; packages.&lt;/li&gt;

 &lt;li&gt;File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
   using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
   directory, using unison.&lt;/li&gt;

 &lt;li&gt;Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
   their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
   the box with CUPS.  For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
   system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
   implemented.&lt;/li&gt;

 &lt;li&gt;For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
   sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.&lt;/li&gt;

 &lt;li&gt;It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
   cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
   local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
the moment.  If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
in time for the Squeeze release to freeze.  Some of the pieces need
tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
(&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/566718&quot;&gt;#566718&lt;/a&gt;) and nslcd (or
perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
when disconnected from the net.  If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Great book: &quot;Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future&quot;</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Great_book___Content__Selected_Essays_on_Technology__Creativity__Copyright__and_the_Future_of_the_Future_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Great_book___Content__Selected_Essays_on_Technology__Creativity__Copyright__and_the_Future_of_the_Future_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 19 Apr 2010 17:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
book titled &quot;Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
Copyright, and the Future of the Future&quot; is available with few
restrictions on the web, for example from
&lt;a href=&quot;http://craphound.com/content/&quot;&gt;his own site&lt;/a&gt;. I read the
epub-version from
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883&quot;&gt;feedbooks&lt;/a&gt; using
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fbreader.org/&quot;&gt;fbreader&lt;/a&gt; and my N810. I
strongly recommend this book.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 14 Apr 2010 17:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/&quot;&gt;Yesterdays
NUUG presentation&lt;/a&gt; about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux.  Setting up a
Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
users and cryptographic keys instead.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A challenge will be integration and administration.  Is there a
Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups?  With it, the
school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together.  Anyone know?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
Nagios.  I have no idea how much work that will be to implement.  We
would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
to work properly.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
configuration and integration.  A natural starting point would be
setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
time.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
presentation, and start using Kerberos at home.  The video show show
up in a few days.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>After 6 years of waiting, the Xreset.d feature is implemented</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/After_6_years_of_waiting__the_Xreset_d_feature_is_implemented.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/After_6_years_of_waiting__the_Xreset_d_feature_is_implemented.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 6 Mar 2010 18:15:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
when the user log out.  A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
package in 2004 (&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/230422&quot;&gt;#230422&lt;/a&gt;),
and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
Today, this finally paid off.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
been updated to use this framework.  Next on my agenda is to make sure
kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
after a user.  With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
a generic way that work with all display managers using this
framework.  My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.&lt;p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Lenny released, work continues</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Lenny_released__work_continues.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Lenny_released__work_continues.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:15:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; was finally
shipped.  This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up.  Work on the first
point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it even is time for some partying?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
next major release, based on Squeeze.  We will try to get as many of
the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:15:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
Nagios.  The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
further.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
configured as a Munin and Nagios server.  In addition, it is
configured to be a server for the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary&quot;&gt;SiteSummary
system&lt;/a&gt; I have written for use in Debian Edu.  The SiteSummary
system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
work.  In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
computer submitting information to this collector.  This allow for
automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
packages got etc.  This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
and Nagios configuration.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
services detected).  In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
the machine.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
is to set the password used to get access via HTTP.  The system
administrator need to run &quot;&lt;tt&gt;htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
nagiosadmin&lt;/tt&gt;&quot; to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages.  After that,
everything is taken care of.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Relative popularity of document formats (MS Office vs. ODF)</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Relative_popularity_of_document_formats__MS_Office_vs__ODF_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Relative_popularity_of_document_formats__MS_Office_vs__ODF_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage.  I searched using
&#39;filetype:odt&#39; and equvalent terms, and got these results:&lt;/P&gt;

&lt;table&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;th&gt;Type&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;ODF&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;MS Office&lt;/th&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Tekst&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;odt:282000&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;docx:308000&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Presentasjon&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;odp:75600&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;pptx:183000&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Regneark&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;ods:26500     &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;xlsx:145000&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;/table&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Next, I added a &#39;site:no&#39; limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
got these numbers:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;table&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;th&gt;Type&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;ODF&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;MS Office&lt;/th&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Tekst&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;odt:2480 &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;docx:4460&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Presentasjon&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;odp:299   &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;pptx:741&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Regneark&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;ods:187       &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;xlsx:372&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;/table&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I wonder how these numbers change over time.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
they are conduced in another country.  Because of this, I did the same
search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
search done from a machine here in Norway.&lt;/p&gt;


&lt;table&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;th&gt;Type&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;ODF&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;MS Office&lt;/th&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Tekst&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;odt:129000&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;docx:308000&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Presentasjon&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;odp:44200&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;pptx:93900&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Regneark&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;ods:26500     &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;xlsx:82400&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;/table&gt;

&lt;p&gt;And with &#39;site:no&#39;:

&lt;table&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;th&gt;Type&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;ODF&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;MS Office&lt;/th&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Tekst&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;odt:2480&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;docx:3410&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Presentasjon&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;odp:175&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;pptx:604&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Regneark&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;ods:186       &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;xlsx:296&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;/table&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
numbers.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>ISO still hope to fix OOXML</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 8 Aug 2009 14:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a
href=&quot;http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html&quot;&gt;a
blog post from Torsten Werner&lt;/a&gt;, the current defect report for ISO
29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages.  His interesting point is that the
defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
can be fixed in ISO.  Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
close to solving the problems.  I was part of the Norwegian committee
involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
with the future ahead of it.  We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
seminar this autumn.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 27 Jul 2009 23:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
non-predictable kernel in the early boot.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Taking over sysvinit development</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
the package up to date.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
upstream project at &lt;a href=&quot;http://savannah.nongnu.org/&quot;&gt;Savannah&lt;/a&gt;, and continue
development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
working on the future release.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian boots quicker and quicker</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
funded
&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint&quot;&gt;developer
gathering&lt;/a&gt;. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
boot:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Use dash as /bin/sh.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
   clock is in UTC.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Install and activate the insserv package to enable
   &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot&quot;&gt;dependency
   based boot sequencing&lt;/a&gt;, and enable concurrent booting.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;

These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
&lt;a href=&quot;http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/&quot;&gt;Carlos
Villegas&lt;/a&gt;.

&lt;p&gt;Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
using this.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
this would be to enable insserv and run &#39;mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
insserv&#39;.  Will need to test if that work. :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Two projects that have improved the quality of free software a lot</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 2 May 2009 15:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
do not yet know them.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The first one is &lt;a href=&quot;http://valgrind.org/&quot;&gt;valgrind&lt;/a&gt;, a
tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run &#39;valgrind program&#39;,
and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
to report the source file name and line number where the problem
occurs.  It can report things like &#39;reading past memory block in file
X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M&#39;, and
&#39;using uninitialised value in control logic&#39;.  This tool has made it
trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.

&lt;p&gt;The second one is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity&quot;&gt;Coverity&lt;/a&gt; which is
a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
and the company behind it is running
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scan.coverity.com/&quot;&gt;a community service&lt;/a&gt; for the
free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like &#39;lock L taken in file
X line N is never released if exiting in line M&#39;, or &#39;the code in file
Y lines O to P can never be executed&#39;.  The projects included in the
community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
reliability problems thanks to Coverity.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
surrounded by today.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>No patch is not better than a useless patch</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Julien Blache
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214&quot;&gt;claim that no
patch is better than a useless patch&lt;/a&gt;.  I completely disagree, as a
patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
properties.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Recording video from cron using VLC</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 5 Apr 2009 10:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net.  The
task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
vlc.  I finally found a way to do it today.  I spent an hour or so
searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation.  The
hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
SAVEFILE=rms.ogg
DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
  --sout=&quot;#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url=&#39;$SAVEFILE&#39;},dst=nodisplay}&quot; \
  --intf=dummy&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
duplicating the output stream to &quot;nodisplay&quot; and the file, using the
dummy interface.  The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
sure no X interface is needed.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
the vlc process with SIGTERM.  Here is a complete script
&lt;tt&gt;vlc-record&lt;/tt&gt; to use from &lt;tt&gt;at&lt;/tt&gt; or &lt;tt&gt;cron&lt;/tt&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;#!/bin/sh
set -e
URL=&quot;$1&quot;
SAVEFILE=&quot;$2&quot;
DURATION=&quot;$3&quot;
DISPLAY= vlc -q &quot;$URL&quot; \
  --sout=&quot;#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url=&#39;$SAVEFILE&#39;},dst=nodisplay}&quot; \
  --intf=dummy &lt; /dev/null &gt; /dev/null 2&gt;&amp;1 &amp;
pid=$!
sleep $DURATION
kill $pid
wait $pid&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
application.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
blocked from doing so.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
requirements change.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 29 Mar 2009 21:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
now. :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Time for new  LDAP schemas replacing RFC 2307?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 29 Mar 2009 20:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu/Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;,
we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
specifications to cleam up this mess.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
(mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
new IETF work group?&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Checking server hardware support status for Dell, HP and IBM servers</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2009 23:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
status, I&#39;ve recently spent time on extending the machine register to
include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
parts from other machines or move the service to another old
machine.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
use LWP::Simple;
use POSIX;
use WWW::Mechanize;
use Date::Parse;
[...]
sub get_support_info {
    my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
    my $str;

    if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
        # fetch website from Dell support
        my $url = &quot;http://support.euro.dell.com/support/topics/topic.aspx/emea/shared/support/my_systems_info/no/details?c=no&amp;amp;cs=nodhs1&amp;amp;l=no&amp;amp;s=dhs&amp;amp;ServiceTag=$serial&quot;;
        my $webpage = get($url);
        return undef unless ($webpage);

        my $daysleft = -1;
        my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
        foreach my $line (@lines) {
            next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
            $line =~ s/&amp;lt;[^&gt;]+?&gt;/;/gm;
            $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;

            my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
            @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
            my $lastend = &quot;&quot;;
            while ($f[3] eq &quot;DELL&quot;) {
                my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];

                my $start = POSIX::strftime(&quot;%Y-%m-%d&quot;,
                                            localtime(str2time($startstr)));
                my $end = POSIX::strftime(&quot;%Y-%m-%d&quot;,
                                          localtime(str2time($endstr)));
                $str .= &quot;$type $start -&gt; $end &quot;;
                @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
                $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
            }
            my $today = POSIX::strftime(&quot;%Y-%m-%d&quot;, localtime(time));
            tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
                if ($lastend lt $today);
        }
    } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
        my $mech = WWW::Mechanize-&gt;new();
        my $url =
            &#39;http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do&#39;;
        $mech-&gt;get($url);
        my $fields = {
            &#39;BODServiceID&#39; =&gt; &#39;NA&#39;,
            &#39;RegisteredPurchaseDate&#39; =&gt; &#39;&#39;,
            &#39;country&#39; =&gt; &#39;NO&#39;,
            &#39;productNumber&#39; =&gt; $productnumber,
            &#39;serialNumber1&#39; =&gt; $serial,
        };
        $mech-&gt;submit_form( form_number =&gt; 2,
                            fields      =&gt; $fields );
        # Next step is screen scraping
        my $content = $mech-&gt;content();

        $content =~ s/&amp;lt;[^&gt;]+?&gt;/;/gm;
        $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
        $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
        $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;

        my $today = POSIX::strftime(&quot;%Y-%m-%d&quot;, localtime(time));

        while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
            my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
                m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
            $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
            my $start = POSIX::strftime(&quot;%Y-%m-%d&quot;,
                                        localtime(str2time($startstr)));
            my $end = POSIX::strftime(&quot;%Y-%m-%d&quot;,
                                      localtime(str2time($stopstr)));

            $str .= &quot;$type ($status) $start -&gt; $end &quot;;

            tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
                if ($end lt $today);
        }
    } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
        # This code ignore extended support contracts.
        my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
        if ($producttype &amp;amp;&amp;amp; $serial) {
            my $content =
                get(&quot;http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;amp;brandind=5000008&amp;amp;Submit=Submit&amp;amp;type=$producttype&amp;amp;serial=$serial&quot;);
            if ($content) {
                $content =~ s/&amp;lt;[^&gt;]+?&gt;/;/gm;
                $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
                $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
                $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;

                $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
                my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;

                $str .= &quot;($status) -&gt; $end &quot;;

                my $today = POSIX::strftime(&quot;%Y-%m-%d&quot;, localtime(time));
                tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
                    if ($end lt $today);
            }
        }
    }
    return $str;
}
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
from dmidecode.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
print get_support_info(&quot;hp.host&quot;, &quot;HP ProLiant BL460c G1&quot;, &quot;1234567890&quot;
                       &quot;447707-B21&quot;);
print get_support_info(&quot;dell.host&quot;, &quot;Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950&quot;, &quot;1234567&quot;);
print get_support_info(&quot;ibm.host&quot;, &quot;IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-&quot;,
                       &quot;1234567&quot;);
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
do so.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Using bar codes at a computing center</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 20 Feb 2009 08:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
in our computing center.  This give us a challenge in tracking the
location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
removed.  Some times the location register is not updated when a
computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
the &quot;missing&quot; computer.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.libdmtx.org/&quot;&gt;libdmtx&lt;/a&gt; to write and read bar
code blocks as defined in the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix&quot;&gt;The Data Matrix
Standard&lt;/a&gt;.  This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture.  The bar code standard
allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag.  There is another project
with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/&quot;&gt;a bar code
writer written in postscript&lt;/a&gt; capable of creating such bar codes,
but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
codes.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
machines in our computing center.  If both racks and computers are
tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
locations, and can detect movements and removals.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
random rack and tagged all the machines with their names.  Next, I
took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read.  This worked
fairly well.  If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
side, all tags in the image could be read.  Because of limited space
between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
about half the rack.  I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
easier automatic tracking of computers.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>When web browser developers make a video player...</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/When_web_browser_developers_make_a_video_player___.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/When_web_browser_developers_make_a_video_player___.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 17 Jan 2009 18:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;As part of the work we do in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nuug.no&quot;&gt;NUUG&lt;/a&gt;
to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
will become easier when the &amp;lt;video&amp;gt; tag is implemented in all
browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
&amp;lt;video&amp;gt; tag, the &amp;lt;object&amp;gt; tag, the &amp;lt;embed&amp;gt; tag and
the &amp;lt;applet&amp;gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
finding the best options is a major challenge.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from &lt;a
href=&quot;http://labs.opera.com&quot;&gt;labs.opera.com&lt;/a&gt;, to see how it handled
a &amp;lt;video&amp;gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
discover that I have to add the controls=&quot;true&quot; attribute to be able
to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
autoplay=&quot;true&quot; did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
&amp;lt;video&amp;gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
playing when the download is done.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/&quot;&gt;available
from the nuug site&lt;/a&gt;.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
too.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Software video mixer on a USB stick</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 28 Dec 2008 15:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nuug.no/&quot;&gt;Norwegian Unix User Group&lt;/a&gt; is
recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
directly with the video stream.  For this, we use the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/&quot;&gt;dvswitch&lt;/a&gt; package from
the Debian video team.  As this require quite one computer per video
source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
borrow laptops.  And to avoid having to install extra software on
these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
bootable USB stick.  The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
source, sink and mixer applications and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kinodv.org/&quot;&gt;dvgrab&lt;/a&gt;.  To allow this setup to
work without any configuration, I&#39;ve patched dvswitch to use
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.avahi.org/&quot;&gt;avahi&lt;/a&gt; to connect the various parts
together.  And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
with USB sources.  We have not yet tested this setup in a production
setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
video mixer in a very short time frame.  We will need it for
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.goopen.no/&quot;&gt;Go Open 2009&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz&quot;&gt;The
USB image&lt;/a&gt; is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
larger stick as well.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Devcamp brought us closer to the Lenny based Debian Edu release</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 7 Dec 2008 12:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
finish it before the weekend was up.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
of these cards.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
notes are available on
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia&quot;&gt;the
Debian wiki&lt;/a&gt;.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn&#39;t supported by the
totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
be the only one fitting our needs. :/&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        </channel>
</rss>