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  13  <h1>
  14      <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  15
  16  </h1>
  17
  18 </div>
  19
  20
  21     <h3>Entries tagged "english".</h3>
  22
  23     <div class="entry">
  24       <div class="title">
  25         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_home_and_release_1_0_for_netgroup_and_innetgr__aka_ng_utils_.html">New home and release 1.0 for netgroup and innetgr (aka ng-utils)</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28         22nd February 2014
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
  32 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
  33 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
  34 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
  35 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
  36 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
  37 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
  38 proper home since then.</p>
  39
  40 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
  41 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
  42 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
  43 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
  44 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
  45
  46 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
  47 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
  48 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
  49 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
  50 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
  51 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
  52 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
  53 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
  54 Debian Unstable.</p>
  55
  56       </div>
  57       <div class="tags">
  58
  59
  60         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
  61
  62
  63       </div>
  64     </div>
  65     <div class="padding"></div>
  66
  67     <div class="entry">
  68       <div class="title">
  69         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
  70       </div>
  71       <div class="date">
  72          3rd February 2014
  73       </div>
  74       <div class="body">
  75         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
  76 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
  77 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
  78 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
  79 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
  80 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
  81 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
  82 <a href="http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz">http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz</a>,
  83 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
  84
  85 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
  86 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
  87 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
  88 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
  89 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
  90 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
  91
  92 <p><blockquote><pre>
  93 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
  94 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
  95 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
  96 dhclient /dev/eth0
  97 </pre></blockquote></p>
  98
  99 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
 100 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
 101 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
 102
 103 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
 104 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
 105 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
 106 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
 107 side.</p>
 108
 109 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
 110 stuff:</p>
 111
 112 <p><blockquote><pre>
 113 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
 114 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
 115 EOF
 116 apt-get update
 117 apt-get dist-upgrade
 118 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
 119     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
 120 update-alternatives --config runsystem
 121 </pre></blockquote></p>
 122
 123 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
 124 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
 125 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
 126 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
 127 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
 128 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
 129 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
 130 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
 131 ssh instead.
 132
 133 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
 134 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
 135 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
 136 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
 137 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
 138 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
 139
 140 <p><blockquote><pre>
 141 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
 142 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
 143 EOF
 144 </pre></blockquote></p>
 145
 146 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
 147 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
 148 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
 149 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
 150
 151 <p><blockquote><pre>
 152 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
 153 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
 154 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
 155 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
 156 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
 157 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
 158 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
 159 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
 160 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
 161 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
 162 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
 163 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
 164 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
 165 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
 166 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
 167 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
 168 #
 169 </pre></blockquote></p>
 170
 171 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
 172 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
 173 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
 174 command line stuff.<p>
 175
 176       </div>
 177       <div class="tags">
 178
 179
 180         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 181
 182
 183       </div>
 184     </div>
 185     <div class="padding"></div>
 186
 187     <div class="entry">
 188       <div class="title">
 189         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html">A fist full of non-anonymous Bitcoins</a>
 190       </div>
 191       <div class="date">
 192         29th January 2014
 193       </div>
 194       <div class="body">
 195         <p>Bitcoin is a incredible use of peer to peer communication and
 196 encryption, allowing direct and immediate money transfer without any
 197 central control.  It is sometimes claimed to be ideal for illegal
 198 activity, which I believe is quite a long way from the truth.  At least
 199 I would not conduct illegal money transfers using a system where the
 200 details of every transaction are kept forever.  This point is
 201 investigated in
 202 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">USENIX ;login:</a>
 203 from December 2013, in the article
 204 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/03_meiklejohn-online.pdf">A
 205 Fistful of Bitcoins - Characterizing Payments Among Men with No
 206 Names</a>" by Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole,Grant Jordan, Kirill
 207 Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage.  They
 208 analyse the transaction log in the Bitcoin system, using it to find
 209 addresses belong to individuals and organisations and follow the flow
 210 of money from both Bitcoin theft and trades on Silk Road to where the
 211 money end up.  This is how they wrap up their article:</p>
 212
 213 <p><blockquote>
 214 <p>"To demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analysis, we turned
 215 our attention to criminal activity. In the Bitcoin economy, criminal
 216 activity can appear in a number of forms, such as dealing drugs on
 217 Silk Road or simply stealing someone else’s bitcoins. We followed the
 218 flow of bitcoins out of Silk Road (in particular, from one notorious
 219 address) and from a number of highly publicized thefts to see whether
 220 we could track the bitcoins to known services. Although some of the
 221 thieves attempted to use sophisticated mixing techniques (or possibly
 222 mix services) to obscure the flow of bitcoins, for the most part
 223 tracking the bitcoins was quite straightforward, and we ultimately saw
 224 large quantities of bitcoins flow to a variety of exchanges directly
 225 from the point of theft (or the withdrawal from Silk Road).</p>
 226
 227 <p>As acknowledged above, following stolen bitcoins to the point at
 228 which they are deposited into an exchange does not in itself identify
 229 the thief; however, it does enable further de-anonymization in the
 230 case in which certain agencies can determine (through, for example,
 231 subpoena power) the real-world owner of the account into which the
 232 stolen bitcoins were deposited.  Because such exchanges seem to serve
 233 as chokepoints into and out of the Bitcoin economy (i.e., there are
 234 few alternative ways to cash out), we conclude that using Bitcoin for
 235 money laundering or other illicit purposes does not (at least at
 236 present) seem to be particularly attractive."</p>
 237 </blockquote><p>
 238
 239 <p>These researches are not the first to analyse the Bitcoin
 240 transaction log.  The 2011 paper
 241 "<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524">An Analysis of Anonymity in
 242 the Bitcoin System</A>" by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan is
 243 summarized like this:</p>
 244
 245 <p><blockquote>
 246 "Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a
 247 complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by
 248 public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will
 249 attempt to construct the one-to-many mapping between users and
 250 public-keys and associate information external to the system with the
 251 users. Bitcoin tries to prevent this attack by storing the mapping of
 252 a user to his or her public-keys on that user's node only and by
 253 allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In
 254 this chapter we consider the topological structure of two networks
 255 derived from Bitcoin's public transaction history. We show that the
 256 two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide
 257 complementary views of the Bitcoin system and have implications for
 258 anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and
 259 techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate
 260 an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a
 261 market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars."
 262 </blockquote></p>
 263
 264 <p>I hope these references can help kill the urban myth that Bitcoin
 265 is anonymous.  It isn't really a good fit for illegal activites.  Use
 266 cash if you need to stay anonymous, at least until regular DNA
 267 sampling of notes and coins become the norm. :)</p>
 268
 269 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 270 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 271 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 272
 273       </div>
 274       <div class="tags">
 275
 276
 277         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
 278
 279
 280       </div>
 281     </div>
 282     <div class="padding"></div>
 283
 284     <div class="entry">
 285       <div class="title">
 286         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
 287       </div>
 288       <div class="date">
 289         14th January 2014
 290       </div>
 291       <div class="body">
 292         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
 293 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
 294 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
 295 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
 296 the source.  The company behind it provide
 297 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
 298 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
 299 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
 300 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
 301 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
 302 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
 303 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
 304 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
 305 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
 306 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
 307 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
 308 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
 309 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
 310 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
 311 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
 312 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
 313 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
 314 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
 315 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
 316
 317 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
 318
 319 <ul>
 320
 321   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
 322   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
 323   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
 324
 325 </ul>
 326
 327 <p>You can
 328 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
 329 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
 330 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
 331 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
 332 include a test suite check.</p>
 333
 334       </div>
 335       <div class="tags">
 336
 337
 338         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 339
 340
 341       </div>
 342     </div>
 343     <div class="padding"></div>
 344
 345     <div class="entry">
 346       <div class="title">
 347         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html">Debian Edu interview: Dominik George</a>
 348       </div>
 349       <div class="date">
 350         25th December 2013
 351       </div>
 352       <div class="body">
 353         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
 354 project</a> consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
 355 was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
 356 up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
 357 successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School.  Say hello
 358 to <a href="https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Natureshadow">Dominik
 359 George</a>.</p>
 360
 361 <!-- http://www.dominik-george.de/images/foto.jpg -->
 362
 363 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
 364
 365 <p>I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
 366 life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
 367 student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
 368 Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
 369 voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
 370 a bit vacant right now however.</p>
 371
 372 <p>I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
 373 (public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
 374 around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
 375 it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
 376 network of that school together with a team of very interested and
 377 talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
 378 learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
 379 to help building another school's informational education concept from
 380 scratch.</p>
 381
 382 <p>That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
 383 and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
 384 ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.</p>
 385
 386 <p>When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
 387 and cycling.</p>
 388
 389 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
 390 project?</strong></p>
 391
 392 <p>I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
 393 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">FrOSCon</a> and visited the project
 394 booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
 395 have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
 396 own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
 397 "out-of-the-box" solution ;).</p>
 398
 399 <p>The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
 400 <a href="http://www.openrheinruhr.de">OpenRheinRuhr</a> 2011 when the
 401 BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
 402 really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
 403 ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
 404 a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
 405 guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
 406 small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
 407 seemed rather uninterested.</p>
 408
 409 <p>After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
 410 mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
 411 reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
 412 basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!</p>
 413
 414 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
 415 Edu?</strong></p>
 416
 417 <p>The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
 418 works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
 419 in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
 420 without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
 421 from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
 422 have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
 423 and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
 424 server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
 425 notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
 426 and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
 427 it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
 428 tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
 429 that it rocks!</p>
 430
 431 <p>Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
 432 politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
 433 operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
 434 will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
 435 school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
 436 this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
 437 too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).</p>
 438
 439 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
 440 Edu?</strong></p>
 441
 442 <p>I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
 443 answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
 444 other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
 445 can list a few points about that:</p>
 446
 447 <ul>
 448
 449  <li>always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
 450  <li>be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
 451  <li>be helpful at being helpful ;)
 452
 453 </ul>
 454
 455 <p>I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!</p>
 456
 457 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
 458
 459 <p>First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
 460 all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
 461 year.</p>
 462
 463 <p>I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
 464 run text tools. I use
 465 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a> as shell,
 466 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm">jupp</a> as very advanced
 467 text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
 468 based full-featured student management software with the two),
 469 <a href="http://mcabber.com/">mcabber</a> for XMPP and
 470 <a href="http://www.irssi.org/">irssi</a> for IRC. For that overly
 471 coloured world called the WWW, I use
 472 <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/">Iceweasel
 473 (Firefox)</a>. Oh, and <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a> for
 474 e-mail.</p>
 475
 476 <p>However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
 477 are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
 478 least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
 479 kids. One of these things is <a href="http://jappix.org/">Jappix</a>,
 480 which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
 481 Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
 482 Facebook now ;).</p>
 483
 484 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
 485 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
 486
 487 <p>Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
 488 side is what I have experienced.</p>
 489
 490 <p>I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
 491 that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
 492 grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
 493 to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
 494 see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
 495 students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
 496 desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
 497 they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
 498 that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 € to buy
 499 software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
 500 networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
 501 not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
 502 already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
 503 if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
 504 that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
 505 plain criminal.</p>
 506
 507 <p>That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
 508 method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
 509 founded an association named
 510 <a href="https://www.teckids.org">Teckids</a> here in Germany that does
 511 just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
 512 area of free and open source software, for example the
 513 <a href="http://kids.froscon.org">FrogLabs</a>, which share staff with
 514 Teckids and are the youth programme of
 515 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">the Free and Open Source Software
 516 Conference (FrOSCon)</a>. We do a lot more than most other conferences
 517 - this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
 518 aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
 519 and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
 520 of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.</p>
 521
 522 <p>Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
 523 the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
 524 their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
 525 Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
 526 clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
 527 it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
 528 who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
 529 We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
 530 open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
 531 software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
 532 group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
 533 Skolelinux in the future ;)!</p>
 534
 535 <p>So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
 536 being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
 537 that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
 538 but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.</p>
 539
 540 <!--
 541
 542 >  * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
 543
 544 That's probably the hardest question of them all, as I do not know the
 545 community. However, I would be willing to do the following:
 546
 547  <li>Run an interview with a German headteacher who is very open to
 548    free software, and also prefers it, but cannot really use it because
 549    of the decision makers above;
 550  <li>Run interviews with some kids, both with and without previous
 551    knowledge about free software
 552
 553 If that is wanted, just let me know ;).
 554
 555 -->
 556
 557       </div>
 558       <div class="tags">
 559
 560
 561         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
 562
 563
 564       </div>
 565     </div>
 566     <div class="padding"></div>
 567
 568     <div class="entry">
 569       <div class="title">
 570         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html">Debian Edu interview: Klaus Knopper</a>
 571       </div>
 572       <div class="date">
 573          6th December 2013
 574       </div>
 575       <div class="body">
 576         <p>It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
 577 but the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
 578 Skolelinux</a> community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
 579 had a new school administrator show up on
 580 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a> to share
 581 his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school.  This
 582 time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
 583 Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
 584 Germany a few years ago.</p>
 585
 586 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
 587
 588 <p>I am Klaus Knopper.  I have a master degree in electrical
 589 engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
 590 the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
 591 freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.</p>
 592
 593 <p>All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
 594 from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental
 595 projects like the <a href="http://www.knoppix.org">Knoppix GNU/Linux live
 596 system</a> (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
 597 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html">ADRIANE</a>
 598 (a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
 599 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/linbo/index-en.html">LINBO</a>
 600 (Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
 601 system supporting various operating systems).</p>
 602
 603 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
 604 project?</strong></p>
 605
 606 <p>The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
 607 coordinator for Skolelinux.  We were looking for an all-in-one open
 608 source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
 609 introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.</p>
 610
 611 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
 612 Edu?</strong></p>
 613
 614 <ul>
 615   <li>Quick installation,</li>
 616   <li>works (almost) out of the box,</li>
 617   <li>contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,</li>
 618   <li>is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
 619     single company,</li>
 620   <li>has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
 621     experience and problem solutions.</li>
 622 </ul>
 623
 624 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
 625 Edu?</strong></p>
 626
 627 <ul>
 628   <li>Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
 629   the next version.  Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
 630   a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
 631   working again reliably.
 632
 633   <li>Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
 634   little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
 635   similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
 636   as their base.
 637
 638   <li>Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
 639   configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
 640   not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
 641   configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
 642   and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
 643   network configuration to make it "Skolelinux-compatible".
 644
 645   <li>Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
 646   contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
 647   distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
 648   Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
 649   future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
 650   schemes.</li>
 651
 652   <li>Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
 653   compared to Debian.</li>
 654
 655 </ul>
 656
 657 <p>For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
 658 rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
 659 Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
 660 upgradeable without reinstallation.</p>
 661
 662 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
 663
 664 <p>GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
 665 programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
 666 occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
 667 programming languages for teaching.</p>
 668
 669 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
 670 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
 671
 672 <p>Strong arguments are</p>
 673
 674 <ul>
 675
 676   <li>Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
 677     teaching and learning.</li>
 678
 679   <li>Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
 680     home, and at their working place without running into license or
 681     conversion problems.</li>
 682
 683   <li>Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
 684     than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
 685     customers to certain products.  But teachers need to teach
 686     science, not products.</li>
 687
 688   <li>If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
 689     would you need proprietary software for?</li>
 690
 691 </ul>
 692
 693       </div>
 694       <div class="tags">
 695
 696
 697         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
 698
 699
 700       </div>
 701     </div>
 702     <div class="padding"></div>
 703
 704     <div class="entry">
 705       <div class="title">
 706         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnadsnett_for_alle__a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo__take_shape.html">Dugnadsnett for alle, a wireless community network in Oslo, take shape</a>
 707       </div>
 708       <div class="date">
 709         30th November 2013
 710       </div>
 711       <div class="body">
 712         <p>If you want the ability to electronically communicate directly with
 713 your neighbors and friends using a network controlled by your peers in
 714 stead of centrally controlled by a few corporations, or would like to
 715 experiment with interesting network technology, the
 716 <a href="http://www.dugnadsnett.no/">Dugnasnett for alle i Oslo</a>
 717 might be project for you.  39 mesh nodes are currently being planned,
 718 in the freshly started initiative from NUUG and Hackeriet to create a
 719 wireless community network.  The work is inspired by
 720 <a href="http://freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a>,
 721 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan
 722 Network</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet">Roofnet</a>
 723 and other successful mesh networks around the globe.  Two days ago we
 724 held a workshop to try to get people started on setting up their own
 725 mesh node, and there we decided to create a new mailing list
 726 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/dugnadsnett">dugnadsnett
 727 (at) nuug.no</a> and IRC channel
 728 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#dugnadsnett.no">#dugnadsnett.no</a> to
 729 coordinate the work.  See also the NUUG blog post
 730 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/E_postliste_og_IRC_kanal_for_Dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">announcing
 731 the mailing list and IRC channel</a>.</p>
 732
 733       </div>
 734       <div class="tags">
 735
 736
 737         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
 738
 739
 740       </div>
 741     </div>
 742     <div class="padding"></div>
 743
 744     <div class="entry">
 745       <div class="title">
 746         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
 747       </div>
 748       <div class="date">
 749         24th November 2013
 750       </div>
 751       <div class="body">
 752         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
 753 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
 754 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
 755 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
 756 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
 757 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
 758 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
 759 is working on.  I checked the
 760 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
 761 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
 762 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
 763 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
 764 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
 765 These are the release notes:</p>
 766
 767 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
 768
 769 <ul>
 770
 771   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
 772    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
 773    up.</li>
 774
 775   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
 776
 777   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
 778    Matthias Klose.</li>
 779
 780   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
 781    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
 782
 783   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
 784    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
 785    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
 786
 787 </ul>
 788
 789 <p>You can
 790 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
 791 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
 792 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
 793 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
 794 include a testsuite check.</p>
 795
 796       </div>
 797       <div class="tags">
 798
 799
 800         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 801
 802
 803       </div>
 804     </div>
 805     <div class="padding"></div>
 806
 807     <div class="entry">
 808       <div class="title">
 809         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/All_drones_should_be_radio_marked_with_what_they_do_and_who_they_belong_to.html">All drones should be radio marked with what they do and who they belong to</a>
 810       </div>
 811       <div class="date">
 812         21st November 2013
 813       </div>
 814       <div class="body">
 815         <p>Drones, flying robots, are getting more and more popular.  The most
 816 know ones are the killer drones used by some government to murder
 817 people they do not like without giving them the chance of a fair
 818 trial, but the technology have many good uses too, from mapping and
 819 forest maintenance to photography and search and rescue.  I am sure it
 820 is just a question of time before "bad drones" are in the hands of
 821 private enterprises and not only state criminals but petty criminals
 822 too.  The drone technology is very useful and very dangerous.  To have
 823 some control over the use of drones, I agree with Daniel Suarez in his
 824 TED talk
 825 "<a href="https://archive.org/details/DanielSuarez_2013G">The kill
 826 decision shouldn't belong to a robot</a>", where he suggested this
 827 little gem to keep the good while limiting the bad use of drones:</p>
 828
 829 <blockquote>
 830
 831 <p>Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed
 832 I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement
 833 through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on
 834 aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to
 835 download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous
 836 vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and
 837 historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones
 838 to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their
 839 own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their
 840 presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic
 841 drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.</p>
 842
 843 <p>But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It
 844 would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles
 845 and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.</p>
 846
 847 </blockquote>
 848
 849 <p>The key is that <em>every citizen</em> should be able to read the
 850 radio beacons sent from the drones in the area, to be able to check
 851 both the government and others use of drones.  For such control to be
 852 effective, everyone must be able to do it.  What should such beacon
 853 contain?  At least formal owner, purpose, contact information and GPS
 854 location.  Probably also the origin and target position of the current
 855 flight.  And perhaps some registration number to be able to look up
 856 the drone in a central database tracking their movement.  Robots
 857 should not have privacy.  It is people who need privacy.</p>
 858
 859       </div>
 860       <div class="tags">
 861
 862
 863         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 864
 865
 866       </div>
 867     </div>
 868     <div class="padding"></div>
 869
 870     <div class="entry">
 871       <div class="title">
 872         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo_.html">Lets make a wireless community network in Oslo!</a>
 873       </div>
 874       <div class="date">
 875         13th November 2013
 876       </div>
 877       <div class="body">
 878         <p>Today NUUG and Hackeriet announced
 879 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Bli_med___bygge_dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">our
 880 plans to join forces and create a wireless community network in
 881 Oslo</a>.  The workshop to help people get started will take place
 882 Thursday 2013-11-28, but we already are collecting the geolocation of
 883 people joining forces to make this happen.  We have
 884 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/oslo-nodes.geojson">9
 885 locations plotted on the map</a>, but we will need more before we have
 886 a connected mesh spread across Oslo.  If this sound interesting to
 887 you, please join us at the workshop.  If you are too impatient to wait
 888 15 days, please join us on the IRC channel
 889 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
 890 right away. :)</p>
 891
 892       </div>
 893       <div class="tags">
 894
 895
 896         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
 897
 898
 899       </div>
 900     </div>
 901     <div class="padding"></div>
 902
 903     <div class="entry">
 904       <div class="title">
 905         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Running_TP_Link_MR3040_as_a_batman_adv_mesh_node_using_openwrt.html">Running TP-Link MR3040 as a batman-adv mesh node using openwrt</a>
 906       </div>
 907       <div class="date">
 908         10th November 2013
 909       </div>
 910       <div class="body">
 911         <p>Continuing my research into mesh networking, I was recommended to
 912 use TP-Link 3040 and 3600 access points as mesh nodes, and the pair I
 913 bought arrived on Friday.  Here are my notes on how to set up the
 914 MR3040 as a mesh node using
 915 <a href="http://www.openwrt.org/">OpenWrt</a>.</p>
 916
 917 <p>I started by following the instructions on the OpenWRT wiki for
 918 <a href="http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3040">TL-MR3040</a>,
 919 and downloaded
 920 <a href="http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin">the
 921 recommended firmware image</a>
 922 (openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin) and
 923 uploaded it into the original web interface.  The flashing went fine,
 924 and the machine was available via telnet on the ethernet port.  After
 925 logging in and setting the root password, ssh was available and I
 926 could start to set it up as a batman-adv mesh node.</p>
 927
 928 <p>I started off by reading the instructions from
 929 <a href="http://wirelessafrica.meraka.org.za/wiki/index.php?title=Antoine's_Research">Wireless
 930 Africa</a>, which had quite a lot of useful information, but
 931 eventually I followed the recipe from the Open Mesh wiki for
 932 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Batman-adv-openwrt-config">using
 933 batman-adv on OpenWrt</a>.  A small snag was the fact that the
 934 <tt>opkg install kmod-batman-adv</tt> command did not work as it
 935 should.  The batman-adv kernel module would fail to load because its
 936 dependency crc16 was not already loaded.  I
 937 <a href="https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/14452">reported the bug</a> to
 938 the openwrt project and hope it will be fixed soon.  But the problem
 939 only seem to affect initial testing of batman-adv, as configuration
 940 seem to work when booting from scratch.</p>
 941
 942 <p>The setup is done using files in /etc/config/.  I did not bridge
 943 the Ethernet and mesh interfaces this time, to be able to hook up the
 944 box on my local network and log into it for configuration updates.
 945 The following files were changed and look like this after modifying
 946 them:</p>
 947
 948 <p><tt>/etc/config/network</tt></p>
 949
 950 <pre>
 951
 952 config interface 'loopback'
 953         option ifname 'lo'
 954         option proto 'static'
 955         option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
 956         option netmask '255.0.0.0'
 957
 958 config globals 'globals'
 959         option ula_prefix 'fdbf:4c12:3fed::/48'
 960
 961 config interface 'lan'
 962         option ifname 'eth0'
 963         option type 'bridge'
 964         option proto 'dhcp'
 965         option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
 966         option netmask '255.255.255.0'
 967         option hostname 'tl-mr3040'
 968         option ip6assign '60'
 969
 970 config interface 'mesh'
 971         option ifname 'adhoc0'
 972         option mtu '1528'
 973         option proto 'batadv'
 974         option mesh 'bat0'
 975 </pre>
 976
 977 <p><tt>/etc/config/wireless</tt></p>
 978 <pre>
 979
 980 config wifi-device 'radio0'
 981         option type 'mac80211'
 982         option channel '11'
 983         option hwmode '11ng'
 984         option path 'platform/ar933x_wmac'
 985         option htmode 'HT20'
 986         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-20'
 987         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-40'
 988         list ht_capab 'RX-STBC1'
 989         list ht_capab 'DSSS_CCK-40'
 990         option disabled '0'
 991
 992 config wifi-iface 'wmesh'
 993         option device 'radio0'
 994         option ifname 'adhoc0'
 995         option network 'mesh'
 996         option encryption 'none'
 997         option mode 'adhoc'
 998         option bssid '02:BA:00:00:00:01'
 999         option ssid 'meshfx@hackeriet'
1000 </pre>
1001 <p><tt>/etc/config/batman-adv</tt></p>
1002 <pre>
1003
1004 config 'mesh' 'bat0'
1005         option interfaces 'adhoc0'
1006         option 'aggregated_ogms'
1007         option 'ap_isolation'
1008         option 'bonding'
1009         option 'fragmentation'
1010         option 'gw_bandwidth'
1011         option 'gw_mode'
1012         option 'gw_sel_class'
1013         option 'log_level'
1014         option 'orig_interval'
1015         option 'vis_mode'
1016         option 'bridge_loop_avoidance'
1017         option 'distributed_arp_table'
1018         option 'network_coding'
1019         option 'hop_penalty'
1020
1021 # yet another batX instance
1022 # config 'mesh' 'bat5'
1023 #       option 'interfaces' 'second_mesh'
1024 </pre>
1025
1026 <p>The mesh node is now operational.  I have yet to test its range,
1027 but I hope it is good.  I have not yet tested the TP-Link 3600 box
1028 still wrapped up in plastic.</p>
1029
1030       </div>
1031       <div class="tags">
1032
1033
1034         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
1035
1036
1037       </div>
1038     </div>
1039     <div class="padding"></div>
1040
1041     <div class="entry">
1042       <div class="title">
1043         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_init_d_boot_script_example_for_rsyslog.html">Debian init.d boot script example for rsyslog</a>
1044       </div>
1045       <div class="date">
1046          2nd November 2013
1047       </div>
1048       <div class="body">
1049         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
1050 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
1051 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
1052 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
1053 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
1054
1055 <p><pre>
1056 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
1057 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
1058 # Provides:          rsyslog
1059 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
1060 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
1061 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
1062 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
1063 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
1064 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
1065 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
1066 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
1067 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
1068 ### END INIT INFO
1069 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
1070 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
1071 </pre></p>
1072
1073 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
1074 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
1075 info/comments.</p>
1076
1077 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
1078 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
1079
1080 <p><pre>
1081 #!/bin/sh
1082
1083 # Define LSB log_* functions.
1084 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
1085 # and status_of_proc is working.
1086 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
1087
1088 #
1089 # Function that starts the daemon/service
1090
1091 #
1092 do_start()
1093 {
1094         # Return
1095         #   0 if daemon has been started
1096         #   1 if daemon was already running
1097         #   2 if daemon could not be started
1098         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
1099                 || return 1
1100         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
1101                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
1102                 || return 2
1103         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
1104         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
1105         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
1106 }
1107
1108 #
1109 # Function that stops the daemon/service
1110 #
1111 do_stop()
1112 {
1113         # Return
1114         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
1115         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
1116         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
1117         #   other if a failure occurred
1118         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
1119         RETVAL="$?"
1120         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
1121         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
1122         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
1123         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
1124         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
1125         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
1126         # sleep for some time.
1127         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
1128         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
1129         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
1130         rm -f $PIDFILE
1131         return "$RETVAL"
1132 }
1133
1134 #
1135 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
1136 #
1137 do_reload() {
1138         #
1139         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
1140         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
1141         # then implement that here.
1142         #
1143         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
1144         return 0
1145 }
1146
1147 SCRIPTNAME=$1
1148 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
1149 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
1150 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
1151     script="$1"
1152     shift
1153     . $script
1154 else
1155     exit 0
1156 fi
1157
1158 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
1159 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
1160
1161 # Exit if the package is not installed
1162 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
1163
1164 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
1165 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
1166
1167 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
1168 . /lib/init/vars.sh
1169
1170 case "$1" in
1171   start)
1172         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
1173         do_start
1174         case "$?" in
1175                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
1176                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
1177         esac
1178         ;;
1179   stop)
1180         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
1181         do_stop
1182         case "$?" in
1183                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
1184                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
1185         esac
1186         ;;
1187   status)
1188         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
1189         ;;
1190   #reload|force-reload)
1191         #
1192         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
1193         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
1194         #
1195         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
1196         #do_reload
1197         #log_end_msg $?
1198         #;;
1199   restart|force-reload)
1200         #
1201         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
1202         # 'force-reload' alias
1203         #
1204         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
1205         do_stop
1206         case "$?" in
1207           0|1)
1208                 do_start
1209                 case "$?" in
1210                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
1211                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
1212                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
1213                 esac
1214                 ;;
1215           *)
1216                 # Failed to stop
1217                 log_end_msg 1
1218                 ;;
1219         esac
1220         ;;
1221   *)
1222         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
1223         exit 3
1224         ;;
1225 esac
1226
1227 :
1228 </pre></p>
1229
1230 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
1231 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
1232 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
1233 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
1234
1235 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
1236 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
1237 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
1238 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
1239 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
1240
1241       </div>
1242       <div class="tags">
1243
1244
1245         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1246
1247
1248       </div>
1249     </div>
1250     <div class="padding"></div>
1251
1252     <div class="entry">
1253       <div class="title">
1254         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Browser_plugin_for_SPICE__spice_xpi__uploaded_to_Debian.html">Browser plugin for SPICE (spice-xpi) uploaded to Debian</a>
1255       </div>
1256       <div class="date">
1257          1st November 2013
1258       </div>
1259       <div class="body">
1260         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
1261 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
1262 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
1263 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
1264 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
1265 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
1266 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
1267 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
1268 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
1269 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
1270 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
1271 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
1272
1273 <p>The source is now available from
1274 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/spice-xpi.git;a=summary">http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/spice-xpi.git;a=summary</a>.</p>
1275
1276       </div>
1277       <div class="tags">
1278
1279
1280         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1281
1282
1283       </div>
1284     </div>
1285     <div class="padding"></div>
1286
1287     <div class="entry">
1288       <div class="title">
1289         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Teaching_vmdebootstrap_to_create_Raspberry_Pi_SD_card_images.html">Teaching vmdebootstrap to create Raspberry Pi SD card images</a>
1290       </div>
1291       <div class="date">
1292         27th October 2013
1293       </div>
1294       <div class="body">
1295         <p>The
1296 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
1297 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
1298 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
1299 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
1300 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
1301 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
1302 of a plan to simplify the build system for
1303 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
1304 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
1305 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
1306 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
1307 Raspberry Pi.</p>
1308
1309 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
1310 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
1311 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
1312 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
1313 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
1314 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
1315 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
1316 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
1317 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
1318 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
1319 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
1320 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
1321 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
1322 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
1323 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
1324 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
1325 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
1326 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
1327 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
1328 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
1329 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
1330 available from
1331 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
1332 upstream project page</a>.</p>
1333
1334 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
1335 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
1336 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
1337 list:</p>
1338
1339 <p><pre>
1340 #!/bin/sh
1341 set -e # Exit on first error
1342 rootdir="$1"
1343 cd "$rootdir"
1344 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
1345 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
1346 EOF
1347 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
1348 # install a kernel somewhere too.
1349 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
1350     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
1351 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
1352 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
1353 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
1354 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
1355 </pre></p>
1356
1357 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
1358 to build the image:</p>
1359
1360 <pre>
1361 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
1362     --variant minbase \
1363     --arch armel \
1364     --distribution jessie \
1365     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
1366     --image test.img \
1367     --size 600M \
1368     --bootsize 64M \
1369     --boottype vfat \
1370     --log-level debug \
1371     --verbose \
1372     --no-kernel \
1373     --no-extlinux \
1374     --root-password raspberry \
1375     --hostname raspberrypi \
1376     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
1377     --customize `pwd`/customize \
1378     --package netbase \
1379     --package git-core \
1380     --package binutils \
1381     --package ca-certificates \
1382     --package wget \
1383     --package kmod
1384 </pre></p>
1385
1386 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
1387 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
1388 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
1389 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
1390 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
1391 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
1392 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
1393
1394 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
1395 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
1396 build dependency list.</p>
1397
1398 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
1399 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
1400 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
1401 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
1402
1403       </div>
1404       <div class="tags">
1405
1406
1407         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>.
1408
1409
1410       </div>
1411     </div>
1412     <div class="padding"></div>
1413
1414     <div class="entry">
1415       <div class="title">
1416         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">A Raspberry Pi based batman-adv Mesh network node</a>
1417       </div>
1418       <div class="date">
1419         21st October 2013
1420       </div>
1421       <div class="body">
1422         <p>The last few days I have been experimenting with
1423 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki">the
1424 batman-adv mesh technology</a>.  I want to gain some experience to see
1425 if it will fit <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the
1426 Freedombox project</a>, and together with my neighbors try to build a
1427 mesh network around the park where I live.  Batman-adv is a layer 2
1428 mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear
1429 as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.</p>
1430
1431 <p>My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
1432 around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv.  So
1433 instead, I started playing with a
1434 <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/">Raspberry Pi</a>, and tried to
1435 get it working as a mesh node.  My idea is to use it to create a mesh
1436 node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
1437 the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
1438 network.  This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
1439 WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
1440 non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh.  This in turn is useful for
1441 Android phones using <a href="http://servalproject.org/">the Serval
1442 Project</a> voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
1443 phone and message each other for free.  The reason is that Android
1444 phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
1445 the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted.  But if
1446 they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
1447 every client on the local network.</p>
1448
1449 <p>To get this working, I've created a debian package
1450 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node">meshfx-node</a>
1451 and a script
1452 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/build-rpi-mesh-node">build-rpi-mesh-node</a>
1453 to create the Raspberry Pi boot image.  I'm using Debian Jessie (and
1454 not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
1455 Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
1456 image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now.  Also, as
1457 Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
1458 Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit.  I hope
1459 the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
1460 support.</p>
1461
1462 <p>To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
1463 after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:</p>
1464
1465 <p><pre>
1466 % wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
1467     https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
1468 % sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node > build.log 2>&1
1469 % dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
1470 %
1471 </pre></p>
1472
1473 <p>Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
1474 wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node.  At least it does for
1475 me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
1476 ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
1477 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">an
1478 earlier blog post about this mesh testing</a>.</p>
1479
1480 <p>The mesh node was not horribly expensive either.  I bought
1481 everything over the counter in shops nearby.  If I had ordered online
1482 from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:</p>
1483
1484 <p><table>
1485
1486 <tr><th>Supplier</th><th>Model</th><th>NOK</th></tr>
1487 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi model B</td><td>349.90</td></tr>
1488 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi type B case</td><td>99.90</td></tr>
1489 <tr><td>Lefdal</td><td>Jensen Air:Link 25150</td><td>295.-</td></tr>
1490 <tr><td>Clas Ohlson</td><td>Kingston 16 GB SD card</td><td>199.-</td></tr>
1491 <tr><td>Total cost</td><td></td><td>943.80</td></tr>
1492
1493 </table></p>
1494
1495 <p>Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
1496 connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the 1th
1497 floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
1498 play-node I use to develop the image building script.  And some times
1499 I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it.  I look forward
1500 to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
1501 and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)</p>
1502
1503       </div>
1504       <div class="tags">
1505
1506
1507         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
1508
1509
1510       </div>
1511     </div>
1512     <div class="padding"></div>
1513
1514     <div class="entry">
1515       <div class="title">
1516         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot_moved_to_github.html">Perl library to control the Spykee robot moved to github</a>
1517       </div>
1518       <div class="date">
1519         19th October 2013
1520       </div>
1521       <div class="body">
1522         <p>Back in 2010, I created a Perl library to talk to
1523 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spykee">the Spykee robot</a>
1524 (with two belts, wifi, USB and Linux) and made it available from my
1525 web page.  Today I concluded that it should move to a site that is
1526 easier to use to cooperate with others, and moved it to github.  If
1527 you got a Spykee robot, you might want to check out
1528 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/libspykee-perl">the
1529 libspykee-perl github repository</a>.</p>
1530
1531       </div>
1532       <div class="tags">
1533
1534
1535         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
1536
1537
1538       </div>
1539     </div>
1540     <div class="padding"></div>
1541
1542     <div class="entry">
1543       <div class="title">
1544         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_causes__Debian_Outreach_Program_for_Women__EFF_documenting_the_spying_and_Open_access_in_Norway.html">Good causes: Debian Outreach Program for Women, EFF documenting the spying and Open access in Norway</a>
1545       </div>
1546       <div class="date">
1547         15th October 2013
1548       </div>
1549       <div class="body">
1550         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
1551 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
1552 these. :)</p>
1553
1554 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
1555 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
1556 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
1557 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
1558 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
1559 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
1560 hope you will to. :)</p>
1561
1562 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
1563 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
1564 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
1565 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
1566 donated.  Are you next?</p>
1567
1568 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
1569 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
1570 statement under the heading
1571 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
1572 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
1573 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
1574 too.</p>
1575
1576       </div>
1577       <div class="tags">
1578
1579
1580         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1581
1582
1583       </div>
1584     </div>
1585     <div class="padding"></div>
1586
1587     <div class="entry">
1588       <div class="title">
1589         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">Oslo community mesh network - with NUUG and Hackeriet at Hausmania</a>
1590       </div>
1591       <div class="date">
1592         11th October 2013
1593       </div>
1594       <div class="body">
1595         <p>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
1596 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
1597 areas, depending on the radio technology used.  Normal wifi equipment
1598 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
1599 successful examples like
1600 <a href="http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a> and
1601 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network</a>
1602 (see
1603 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
1604 for a large list</a>) around the globe.  To give you an idea how it
1605 work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
1606 can be seen from their
1607 <a href="http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
1608 updated node graph and map</a>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
1609 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
1610 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
1611 and that is the main topic of this blog post.</p>
1612
1613 <p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
1614 to do it as part of my involvement with the <a
1615 href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation</a> community, and
1616 my recent involvement in
1617 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project</a>
1618 finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
1619 Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
1620 when possible, given that most communication between people are
1621 between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
1622 communication patterns).  It also allow people to communicate without
1623 any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
1624 private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
1625 important over the years.</p>
1626
1627 <p>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
1628 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
1629 <a href="http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet</a> at Husmania.  They seem to
1630 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
1631 <a href="http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
1632 Freifunk project</a>, but that effort is now dead and the people
1633 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
1634 <a href="http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx</a>.  Unfortunately the wiki
1635 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
1636 reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
1637 the new project.  A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
1638 from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks.  I
1639 came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
1640 speakers about this talk (from
1641 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY">youtube</a>):</p>
1642
1643 <p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
1644
1645 <p>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
1646 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
1647 figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
1648 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
1649 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
1650 completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
1651 batman-adv for now.  It sure help me to  know that the very cool
1652 <a href="http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia</a>
1653 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
1654 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
1655 less industrialized communities.  Check out this cool video presenting
1656 that project (from
1657 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30qNfzJCQOA">youtube</a>):</p>
1658
1659 <p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
1660
1661 <p>According to the wikipedia page on
1662 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
1663 mesh network</a> there are around 70 competing schemes for routing
1664 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
1665 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
1666 based community mesh networks.</p>
1667
1668 <p>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2
1669 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
1670 network.  One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
1671 vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
1672 computer.  The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
1673 least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up.  A
1674 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
1675 introduction</a> is available from the Open Mesh project.  These are
1676 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:</p>
1677
1678 <p><table>
1679 <tr><th>Setting</th><th>Value</th></tr>
1680 <tr><td>Protocol / kernel module</td><td>batman-adv</td></tr>
1681 <tr><td>ESSID</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet</td></tr>
1682 <td>Channel / Frequency</td><td>11 / 2462</td></tr>
1683 <td>Cell ID</td><td>02:BA:00:00:00:01</td>
1684 </table></p>
1685
1686 <p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
1687 in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers.  (See a nice post from
1688 VillageTelco about
1689 "<a href="http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
1690 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!</a>
1691 for details.)  When these settings are activated and you have some
1692 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
1693 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
1694 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)</p>
1695
1696 <p>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
1697 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
1698 firmware supporting batman-adv.  If anyone know how to use that old
1699 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.</p>
1700
1701 <p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
1702 us on IRC, either channel
1703 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace</a>
1704 or <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug</a> on
1705 irc.freenode.net.</p>
1706
1707 <p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
1708 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
1709 and Innovation called
1710 <a href="http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
1711 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks</a> and elsewhere
1712 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
1713 Grünerløkka in Oslo.  So mesh networks are also interesting for
1714 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
1715 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
1716 know have closed down the experiment.  Perhaps Telenor or others would
1717 be interested in a cooperation?</p>
1718
1719 <p><strong>Update 2013-10-12</strong>: I was just
1720 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2013-October/005900.html">told
1721 by the Serval project developers</a> that they no longer use
1722 batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
1723 mesh system.</p>
1724
1725       </div>
1726       <div class="tags">
1727
1728
1729         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
1730
1731
1732       </div>
1733     </div>
1734     <div class="padding"></div>
1735
1736     <div class="entry">
1737       <div class="title">
1738         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_7_1_install_and_overview_video_from_Marcelo_Salvador.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu 7.1 install and overview video from Marcelo Salvador</a>
1739       </div>
1740       <div class="date">
1741          8th October 2013
1742       </div>
1743       <div class="body">
1744         <p>The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
1745 Salvador had published a
1746 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GgpdqgLFc">video on
1747 Youtube</a> showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
1748 Skolelinux profile.  This is the profile intended for use at home or
1749 on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
1750 services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
1751 in other word a single user machine).  The result is 11 minutes long,
1752 and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
1753 Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
1754 showing the <a href="http://www.zygotebody.com/">Zygote Body 3D model
1755 of the human body</a>, but I guess he did not know about those or find
1756 other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
1757 advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
1758 Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
1759 computers without hard drives by installing one central
1760 <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP server</a>.</p>
1761
1762 <p>Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:</p>
1763
1764 <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-GgpdqgLFc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
1765
1766 <p>Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux?  Please let
1767 me know. :)</p>
1768
1769       </div>
1770       <div class="tags">
1771
1772
1773         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
1774
1775
1776       </div>
1777     </div>
1778     <div class="padding"></div>
1779
1780     <div class="entry">
1781       <div class="title">
1782         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html">Finally, Debian Edu Wheezy is released today!</a>
1783       </div>
1784       <div class="date">
1785         29th September 2013
1786       </div>
1787       <div class="body">
1788         <p>A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
1789 Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team.  The
1790 complete announcement text can be found at
1791 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130928">the Debian News
1792 section</a>, translated to several languages.  Please check it out.</p>
1793
1794 <p>There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon.  One
1795 can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
1796 partition is too small.  A workaround is to extend the partition (use
1797 lvresize + resize2fs in tty 2 while installing).</p>
1798
1799       </div>
1800       <div class="tags">
1801
1802
1803         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1804
1805
1806       </div>
1807     </div>
1808     <div class="padding"></div>
1809
1810     <div class="entry">
1811       <div class="title">
1812         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Videos_about_the_Freedombox_project___for_inspiration_and_learning.html">Videos about the Freedombox project - for inspiration and learning</a>
1813       </div>
1814       <div class="date">
1815         27th September 2013
1816       </div>
1817       <div class="body">
1818         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
1819 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
1820 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
1821 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
1822
1823 <ul>
1824
1825 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
1826 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
1827
1828 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
1829 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
1830
1831 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
1832 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
1833 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
1834 (Youtube)</li>
1835
1836 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
1837 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
1838
1839 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
1840 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
1841
1842 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
1843 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
1844 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
1845
1846 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
1847 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
1848 (Youtube)</li>
1849
1850 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
1851 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
1852
1853 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
1854 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
1855
1856 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
1857 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
1858 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
1859
1860 </ul>
1861
1862 <p>A larger list is available from
1863 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
1864 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
1865
1866 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
1867 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
1868 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
1869 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
1870 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
1871 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
1872 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
1873 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
1874 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
1875 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
1876 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
1877
1878       </div>
1879       <div class="tags">
1880
1881
1882         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
1883
1884
1885       </div>
1886     </div>
1887     <div class="padding"></div>
1888
1889     <div class="entry">
1890       <div class="title">
1891         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_and_probably_last_beta_release_of_Debian_Edu_Wheezy.html">Third and probably last beta release of Debian Edu Wheezy</a>
1892       </div>
1893       <div class="date">
1894         16th September 2013
1895       </div>
1896       <div class="body">
1897         <p>The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
1898 today.  This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:</p>
1899
1900 <blockquote>
1901 <p>Hi,</p>
1902
1903 <p>it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta 2 for
1904 short) of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
1905 Skolelinux</a> based on Debian Wheezy!</p>
1906
1907 <p>Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
1908 we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
1909 weekend.  We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
1910 if you find something, please notify us immediately!</p>
1911
1912 <p>(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
1913 another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)</p>
1914
1915 <p>Noteworthy changes and software updates for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b2
1916 compared to beta1:</p>
1917
1918 <ul>
1919
1920 <li>The KDE proxy setup has been adjusted to use the provided wpad.dat. This
1921 also gets Chromium to use this proxy.</li>
1922 <li>Install kdepim-groupware with KDE desktops to make sure korganizer
1923 understand ical/dav sources.</li>
1924 <li>Increased default maximum size of /var/spool/squid and /skole/backup on the
1925 main server.</li>
1926 <li>A source DVD image containing all source packages is now available as well.</li>
1927 <li>Updates for chromium (29.0.1547.57-1~deb7u1), imagemagick
1928 (6.7.7.10-5+deb7u2), php5 (5.4.4-14+deb7u4), libmodplug
1929 (0.8.8.4-3+deb7u1+git20130828), tiff (4.0.2-6+deb7u2), linux-image
1930 (3.2.0-4-486_3.2.46-1+deb7u1).</li>
1931
1932 </ul>
1933
1934 <p>Where to get it:</p>
1935
1936 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
1937
1938 <ul>
1939 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso</a></li>
1940 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso</a></li>
1941 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso .</li>
1942 </ul>
1943
1944 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is:  3a1c89f4666df80eebcd46c5bf5fedb866f9472f</p>
1945
1946 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
1947 <ul>
1948 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso</a></li>
1949 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso</a></li>
1950 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso .</li>
1951 </ul>
1952
1953 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 702d1718548f401c74bfa6df9f032cc3ee16597e</p>
1954
1955 <p>The Source DVD image has the filename
1956 debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-source-DVD.iso and the SHA1SUM
1957 089eed8b3f962db47aae1f6a9685e9bb2fa30ca5 and is available the same way
1958 as the other isos.</p>
1959
1960 <p>How to report bugs</p>
1961
1962 <p>For information how to report bugs please see
1963 <br><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
1964
1965
1966 <p>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</p>
1967
1968 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
1969 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
1970 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
1971 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
1972 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
1973 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
1974 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
1975 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
1976 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
1977 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
1978 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
1979 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
1980 can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
1981
1982 <p>This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
1983 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
1984 Squeeze release.</p>
1985
1986 <p>Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases</p>
1987
1988 <p>Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
1989 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
1990 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
1991 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
1992 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2)
1993 Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
1994 password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
1995 (backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
1996 to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
1997 directory.</p>
1998
1999
2000 <p>cheers,
2001 <br>        Holger</p>
2002 </blockquote>
2003
2004       </div>
2005       <div class="tags">
2006
2007
2008         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2009
2010
2011       </div>
2012     </div>
2013     <div class="padding"></div>
2014
2015     <div class="entry">
2016       <div class="title">
2017         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recipe_to_test_the_Freedombox_project_on_amd64_or_Raspberry_Pi.html">Recipe to test the Freedombox project on amd64 or Raspberry Pi</a>
2018       </div>
2019       <div class="date">
2020         10th September 2013
2021       </div>
2022       <div class="body">
2023         <p>I was introduced to the
2024 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
2025 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
2026 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
2027 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
2028 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
2029 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
2030 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
2031 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
2032
2033 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
2034 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
2035 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
2036 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
2037 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
2038
2039 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
2040 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
2041 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
2042 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
2043 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
2044 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
2045 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
2046 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
2047 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
2048 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
2049 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
2050 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
2051 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
2052 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
2053 missing in Debian).</p>
2054
2055 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
2056 scripts
2057 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
2058 and a administrative web interface
2059 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
2060 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
2061 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
2062 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
2063 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
2064 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
2065 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
2066 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
2067 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
2068 this is really working yet, see
2069 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
2070 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
2071 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
2072 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
2073 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
2074 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
2075 with lots of half baked features.</p>
2076
2077 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
2078 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
2079 at.</p>
2080
2081 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
2082
2083 <ol>
2084
2085 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
2086 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
2087 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
2088 to the Debian installer:<p>
2089 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
2090
2091 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
2092 install on.</li>
2093
2094 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
2095 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
2096
2097 </ol>
2098
2099 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
2100
2101 <ol>
2102
2103 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
2104 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
2105 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
2106 <pre>
2107 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
2108 </pre></li>
2109 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
2110 <pre>
2111 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
2112    apt-key add -
2113 apt-get update
2114 apt-get install freedombox-setup
2115 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
2116 </pre></li>
2117 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
2118
2119 </ol>
2120
2121 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
2122 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
2123 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
2124 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
2125 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
2126
2127 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
2128 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
2129 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
2130 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
2131
2132 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
2133 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
2134 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
2135 irc.debian.org and the
2136 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
2137 mailing list</a>.</p>
2138
2139 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
2140 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
2141 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
2142 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
2143 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
2144 default password is 'secret'.</p>
2145
2146       </div>
2147       <div class="tags">
2148
2149
2150         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
2151
2152
2153       </div>
2154     </div>
2155     <div class="padding"></div>
2156
2157     <div class="entry">
2158       <div class="title">
2159         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_beta_release__beta_1__of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">Second beta release (beta 1) of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
2160       </div>
2161       <div class="date">
2162         22nd August 2013
2163       </div>
2164       <div class="body">
2165         <p>The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
2166 today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows
2167 integration fixes .  This is the release announcement:</p>
2168
2169 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b1 released 2013-08-22</strong></p>
2170
2171 <p>These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
2172 7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
2173
2174 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
2175
2176 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
2177 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
2178 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
2179 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
2180 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
2181 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
2182 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
2183 the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be
2184 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
2185 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
2186 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
2187 desktop contains
2188 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
2189 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
2190 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
2191 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
2192
2193 <p>This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this
2194 is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze
2195 release.</p>
2196
2197 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
2198 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
2199 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
2200 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
2201 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined
2202 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/08/msg00127.html">on
2203 the mailing list</a>. (2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and
2204 replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password
2205 hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user
2206 need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for
2207 CIFS access to their home directory.</p>
2208
2209 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
2210
2211 <ul>
2212
2213 <li>Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh
2214     work also without a attached tty.</li>
2215 <li>Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to
2216     make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line
2217     tools. Please note, that the command 'update-command-not-found'
2218     has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access
2219     required).</li>
2220
2221 </ul>
2222
2223 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
2224
2225 <ul>
2226
2227 <li>Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool
2228 needed for desktop=xfce installations.</li>
2229 <li>Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB
2230 stick ISO image.</li>
2231 <li>Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).</li>
2232 <li>Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.</li>
2233 <li>Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens
2234     during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to
2235     cope with this.</li>
2236 <li>Make Samba passwords changeable (again) via GOsa².</li>
2237 <li>Fix generation of LM and NT password hashes via GOsa² to avoid
2238     empty password hashes.</li>
2239 <li>Adapted Samba machine domain joining to latest change in the
2240     smbldap-tools Perl package, fixing bugs blocking Windows machines
2241     from joining the Samba domain.</li>
2242
2243 </ul>
2244
2245 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
2246
2247 <ul>
2248
2249 <li>KDE fails to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
2250     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
2251 <li>Chromium also fails to use the proxy when using the KDE desktop
2252     (using the KDE configuration).</li>
2253
2254 </ul>
2255
2256 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
2257
2258 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
2259
2260 <ul>
2261
2262 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso</a></li>
2263
2264 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso</a></li>
2265
2266 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso .</li>
2267
2268 </ul>
2269
2270 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 1e357f80b55e703523f2254adde6d78b
2271 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 7157f9be5fd27c7694d713c6ecfed61c3edda3b2</p>
2272
2273 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
2274
2275 <ul>
2276
2277 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso</a></li>
2278 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso</a></li>
2279 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso .</li>
2280
2281 </ul>
2282
2283 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 7a8408ead59cf7e3cef25afb6e91590b
2284 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: f1817c031f02790d5edb3bfa0dcf8451088ad119</p>
2285
2286
2287 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
2288
2289 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
2290
2291       </div>
2292       <div class="tags">
2293
2294
2295         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2296
2297
2298       </div>
2299     </div>
2300     <div class="padding"></div>
2301
2302     <div class="entry">
2303       <div class="title">
2304         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_180_SSD_disk_with_Lenovo_firmware_can_not_use_Intel_firmware.html">Intel 180 SSD disk with Lenovo firmware can not use Intel firmware</a>
2305       </div>
2306       <div class="date">
2307         18th August 2013
2308       </div>
2309       <div class="body">
2310         <p>Earlier, I reported about
2311 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
2312 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
2313 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
2314 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
2315 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
2316 currently on the disk.</p>
2317
2318 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
2319 <a href="https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=3472&DwnldID=18363&ProductFamily=Solid-State+Drives+and+Caching&ProductLine=Intel%c2%ae+High+Performance+Solid-State+Drive&ProductProduct=Intel%c2%ae+SSD+520+Series+(180GB%2c+2.5in+SATA+6Gb%2fs%2c+25nm%2c+MLC)&lang=eng">issdfut_2.0.4.iso</a>
2320 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
2321 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
2322 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
2323 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
2324 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
2325 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
2326 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
2327 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
2328 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
2329 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
2330 the broken disks.</p>
2331
2332       </div>
2333       <div class="tags">
2334
2335
2336         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2337
2338
2339       </div>
2340     </div>
2341     <div class="padding"></div>
2342
2343     <div class="entry">
2344       <div class="title">
2345         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/90_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html">90 percent done with the Norwegian draft translation of Free Culture</a>
2346       </div>
2347       <div class="date">
2348          2nd August 2013
2349       </div>
2350       <div class="body">
2351         <p>It has been a while since my last update.  Since last summer, I
2352 have worked on a Norwegian
2353 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
2354 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
2355 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright
2356 law.  Yesterday, I finally broken the 90% mark, when counting the
2357 number of strings to translate.  Due to real life constraints, I have
2358 not had time to work on it since March, but when the summer broke out,
2359 I found time to work on it again.  Still lots of work left, but the
2360 first draft is nearing completion.  I created a graph to show the
2361 progress of the translation:</p>
2362
2363 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
2364
2365 <p>When the first draft is done, the translated text need to be
2366 proof read, and the remaining formatting problems with images and SVG
2367 drawings need to be fixed.  There are probably also some index entries
2368 missing that need to be added.  This can be done by comparing the
2369 index entries listed in the SiSU version of the book, or comparing the
2370 English docbook version with the paper version.  Last, the colophon
2371 page with ISBN numbers etc need to be wrapped up before the release is
2372 done.  I should also figure out how to get correct Norwegian sorting
2373 of the index pages.  All docbook tools I have tried so far (xmlto,
2374 docbook-xsl, dblatex) get the order of symbols and the special
2375 Norwegian letters ÆØÅ wrong.</p>
2376
2377 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
2378 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
2379 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
2380 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
2381 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
2382 around?  There are also some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me.
2383 If you want to help, please get in touch with me, and check out the
2384 project files currently available from
2385 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
2386
2387 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
2388 the updated
2389 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
2390 and
2391 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
2392 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
2393 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
2394 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
2395
2396       </div>
2397       <div class="tags">
2398
2399
2400         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
2401
2402
2403       </div>
2404     </div>
2405     <div class="padding"></div>
2406
2407     <div class="entry">
2408       <div class="title">
2409         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_beta_release_of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">First beta release of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
2410       </div>
2411       <div class="date">
2412         27th July 2013
2413       </div>
2414       <div class="body">
2415         <p>The first wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
2416 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
2417
2418 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b0 released
2419 2013-07-27</strong></p>
2420
2421 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
2422 7.1+edu0~b0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
2423
2424 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
2425
2426 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
2427 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
2428 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
2429 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
2430 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
2431 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
2432 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
2433 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
2434 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
2435 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
2436 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
2437 desktop contains
2438 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
2439 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
2440 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
2441 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
2442
2443 <p>This is the fifth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
2444 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
2445 Squeeze release.</p>
2446
2447 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
2448 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
2449 release.</p>
2450
2451 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
2452
2453 <ul>
2454
2455 <li>Switched roaming workstation profiles from wicd to network-manager
2456    for network configuration, as wicd didn't work any more.</li>
2457 <li>Changed version numbers of patched gosa and libpam-mklocaluser
2458    packages to make sure our locally patched versions will be replaced
2459    by the official packages when they are released from Debian. Those
2460    installing alpha version need to reinstall or manually downgrade gosa
2461    and libpam-mklocaluser.</li>
2462 <li>Added bluetooth tools to the default desktop (bluedevil, blueman).</li>
2463 <li>Added tools for sharing the desktop on KDE (krdc, krfb).</li>
2464 <li>Added valgrind to the default installation for easier debugging of
2465    crash bugs.</li>
2466
2467 </ul>
2468
2469 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
2470
2471 <ul>
2472
2473 <li>Fixed artwork package to work with gnome, no longer break
2474    desktop=gnome installations.</li>
2475 <li>Adjusted installer to now work when forced to use a proxy with the
2476    netinst CD.</li>
2477 <li>Fixed code detecting and setting/loading hardware specific
2478    setup/firmware to work more robust out of the box.</li>
2479 <li>Adjusted Kerberos setup to detect realm and server settings at
2480    install time instead of dynamically at run time. This avoid a crash
2481    with krb5-auth-dialog on diskless workstations without a DNS name.</li>
2482 <li>Worked around misfeature in network-manager not calling the dhclient
2483    exit hooks, causing automatic proxy configuration and automatic host
2484    name setting at run time to work again.</li>
2485 <li>Fixed feature setting the default Iceweasel start page from URL
2486    fetched from LDAP, to allow schools to set the global default by
2487    updating the dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no LDAP object.</li>
2488 <li>Changed default host name on all networked machines to be unique
2489    (generated from MAC or reverse DNS) after boot.</li>
2490 <li>Adjusted partition sizes to make sure they are big enough.</li>
2491
2492 </ul>
2493
2494 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
2495
2496 <ul>
2497
2498 <li>Grub is missing the new artwork.</li>
2499 <li>KDE fail to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
2500     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
2501 <li>Chromium also fail to use the proxy.</li>
2502
2503 </ul>
2504
2505 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
2506
2507 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
2508
2509 <ul>
2510
2511 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso</a></li>
2512
2513 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso</a></li>
2514
2515 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso .</li>
2516
2517 </ul>
2518
2519 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 55d5de9765b6dccd5d9ec33cf1a07109
2520 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 996a1d9517740e4d627d100de2d12b23dd545a3f</p>
2521
2522 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
2523
2524 <ul>
2525
2526 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso</a></li>
2527 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso</a></li>
2528 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso .</li>
2529
2530 </ul>
2531
2532 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: d8f0818c51a78d357de794066f289f69
2533 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 49185ca354e8d0543240423746924f76a6cee733</p>
2534
2535
2536 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
2537
2538 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
2539
2540       </div>
2541       <div class="tags">
2542
2543
2544         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2545
2546
2547       </div>
2548     </div>
2549     <div class="padding"></div>
2550
2551     <div class="entry">
2552       <div class="title">
2553         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">How to fix a Thinkpad X230 with a broken 180 GB SSD disk</a>
2554       </div>
2555       <div class="date">
2556         17th July 2013
2557       </div>
2558       <div class="body">
2559         <p>Today I switched to
2560 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
2561 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
2562 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
2563 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html">180
2564 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
2565 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
2566 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
2567 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
2568 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
2569 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
2570 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
2571 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
2572 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
2573 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
2574 station from now on.</p>
2575
2576 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
2577 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
2578 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
2579 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
2580 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
2581 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
2582 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
2583 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
2584 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
2585 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
2586 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
2587 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
2588
2589 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
2590 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
2591 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
2592 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
2593 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
2594 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
2595 parameters are tuned:</p>
2596
2597 <ul>
2598
2599 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
2600     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
2601
2602 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
2603     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
2604     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
2605
2606 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
2607     systems.</li>
2608
2609 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
2610     /etc/fstab.</li>
2611
2612 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
2613
2614 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
2615     cron.daily).</li>
2616
2617 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
2618     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
2619
2620 </ul>
2621
2622 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
2623 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
2624 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
2625 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
2626 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
2627 from getting the data on the disk (see
2628 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
2629 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
2630 right thing to do.</p>
2631
2632 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
2633 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
2634 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
2635
2636 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
2637 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
2638 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
2639 instead of during my work.</p>
2640
2641 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
2642 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
2643
2644 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
2645 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
2646 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
2647
2648 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
2649 there.</p>
2650
2651 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
2652 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
2653 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
2654 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
2655 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
2656 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
2657 back.</p>
2658
2659       </div>
2660       <div class="tags">
2661
2662
2663         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2664
2665
2666       </div>
2667     </div>
2668     <div class="padding"></div>
2669
2670     <div class="entry">
2671       <div class="title">
2672         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html">Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB with Lenovo firmware still lock up from sustained writes</a>
2673       </div>
2674       <div class="date">
2675         10th July 2013
2676       </div>
2677       <div class="body">
2678         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
2679 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
2680 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
2681 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
2682 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
2683 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
2684 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
2685 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
2686
2687 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
2688 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
2689 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
2690 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
2691 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
2692 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
2693 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
2694 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
2695 lock up when I download a new
2696 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
2697 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
2698 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
2699
2700 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
2701 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
2702 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
2703 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
2704 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
2705 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
2706
2707 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
2708 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
2709 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
2710 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
2711 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
2712 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
2713
2714 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
2715 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
2716 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
2717 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
2718 exist).</p>
2719
2720       </div>
2721       <div class="tags">
2722
2723
2724         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2725
2726
2727       </div>
2728     </div>
2729     <div class="padding"></div>
2730
2731     <div class="entry">
2732       <div class="title">
2733         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/July_13th__Debian_Ubuntu_BSP_and_Skolelinux_Debian_Edu_developer_gathering_in_Oslo.html">July 13th: Debian/Ubuntu BSP and Skolelinux/Debian Edu developer gathering in Oslo</a>
2734       </div>
2735       <div class="date">
2736          9th July 2013
2737       </div>
2738       <div class="body">
2739         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
2740 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
2741 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
2742 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
2743 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
2744 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
2745 Bitraf</a>.</p>
2746
2747 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
2748 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
2749 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
2750 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
2751 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
2752
2753       </div>
2754       <div class="tags">
2755
2756
2757         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
2758
2759
2760       </div>
2761     </div>
2762     <div class="padding"></div>
2763
2764     <div class="entry">
2765       <div class="title">
2766         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230?</a>
2767       </div>
2768       <div class="date">
2769          5th July 2013
2770       </div>
2771       <div class="body">
2772         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
2773 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
2774 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
2775 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
2776 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
2777 ended up picking a
2778 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
2779 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
2780 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
2781 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
2782 on that below.</p>
2783
2784 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
2785 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
2786 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
2787 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
2788 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
2789 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
2790 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
2791 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
2792 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
2793
2794 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
2795 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
2796 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
2797 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
2798 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
2799 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
2800 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
2801
2802 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
2803 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
2804
2805 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
2806 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
2807 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
2808 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
2809 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
2810 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
2811 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
2812 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
2813 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
2814 kernel developers as
2815 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
2816 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
2817 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
2818 Lenovo forums, both for
2819 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
2820 2012-11-10</a> and for
2821 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/x230-SATA-errors-with-180GB-Intel-520-SSD-under-heavy-write-load/m-p/1068147">X230
2822 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
2823 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
2824 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
2825 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
2826 There is even a
2827 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
2828 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
2829 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
2830
2831 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
2832 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
2833 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
2834 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
2835 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
2836 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
2837 fixed. :)</p>
2838
2839       </div>
2840       <div class="tags">
2841
2842
2843         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2844
2845
2846       </div>
2847     </div>
2848     <div class="padding"></div>
2849
2850     <div class="entry">
2851       <div class="title">
2852         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230</a>
2853       </div>
2854       <div class="date">
2855          4th July 2013
2856       </div>
2857       <div class="body">
2858         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
2859 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
2860 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
2861 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
2862 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
2863 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
2864 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
2865 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
2866 with an expencive door stop.</p>
2867
2868 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
2869 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
2870 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
2871 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
2872 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
2873 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
2874 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
2875
2876 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
2877 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
2878 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
2879 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
2880 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
2881 new laptop now. :)</p>
2882
2883 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
2884
2885       </div>
2886       <div class="tags">
2887
2888
2889         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2890
2891
2892       </div>
2893     </div>
2894     <div class="padding"></div>
2895
2896     <div class="entry">
2897       <div class="title">
2898         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fourth_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">Fourth alpha release of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
2899       </div>
2900       <div class="date">
2901          3rd July 2013
2902       </div>
2903       <div class="body">
2904         <p>The fourth wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
2905 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
2906
2907 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~alpha3 released
2908 2013-07-03</strong></p>
2909
2910 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
2911 7.1+edu0~alpha3, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
2912
2913 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
2914
2915 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
2916 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
2917 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
2918 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
2919 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
2920 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
2921 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
2922 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
2923 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
2924 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
2925 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
2926 desktop contains
2927 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
2928 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
2929 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
2930 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
2931
2932 <p>This is the fourth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
2933 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
2934 Squeeze release.</p>
2935
2936 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
2937 <ul>
2938   <li>Dropped ispell dictionaries from our default installation.</li>
2939   <li>Dropped menu-xdg from the KDE desktop option, to drop the Debian
2940     submenu.  It was not included with Gnome, LXDE or Xfce, so this
2941     brings KDE in line with the others.</li>
2942   <li>Dropped xdrawchem, xjig and xsok from our default installation as
2943     they don't have a desktop menu entry and thus won't show up in the
2944     menu now that menu-xdg was removed.</li>
2945   <li>Removed the killer system to kill left behind processes on
2946     multi-user machines, as it was no longer able to understand when a
2947     X display was in use and killed the processes of the active users
2948     too.</li>
2949   <li>Dropped the golearn (from goplay) package as the debtags in wheezy
2950     are too few to make the package useful.</li>
2951 </ul>
2952 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
2953 <ul>
2954   <li>Updated artwork matching http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
2955   <li>Multi-arch i386/amd64 USB stick ISO available.</li>
2956   <li>Got rid of ispell/wordlist related debconf questions that showed
2957     up for some language options.</li>
2958   <li>Switched to using http.debian.net as APT source by default.</li>
2959   <li>Fixed proxy configuration on Main Server installations.</li>
2960   <li>Changed LTSP setup to ask dpkg to use force-unsafe-io the same way
2961     d-i is doing it.</li>
2962   <li>Made sure root and user passwords were not left behind in the
2963     debconf database after installation on Main Server installations.</li>
2964   <li>Made Roaming Workstation dynamic setup more robust and added draft
2965     script setup-ad-client to hook a Roaming Workstation up to a
2966     Active Directory server instead of a Debian Edu Main Server.</li>
2967   <li>Update system to install needed firmware packages during
2968     installation, to work properly in Wheezy.</li>
2969   <li>Update system to handle hardware quirks (debian-edu-hwsetup).</li>
2970   <li>Corrected PXE installation setup to properly pass selected desktop
2971     and keymap settings to PXE installation clients.</li>
2972   <li>LTSP diskless workstations use sshfs by default, allowing them to
2973     work without adding them to DNS and NIS netgroups for NFS access.</li>
2974 </ul>
2975 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
2976 <ul>
2977   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
2978     available yet (698840).</li>
2979   <li>Artwork not enabled for all desktops.</li>
2980 </ul>
2981 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
2982
2983 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
2984 <ul>
2985   <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso</a></li>
2986   <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso</a></li>
2987   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso .</li>
2988 </ul>
2989
2990 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 2b161a99d2a848c376d8d04e3854e30c
2991 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 498922e9c508c0a7ee9dbe1dfe5bf830d779c3c8</p>
2992
2993 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
2994 <ul>
2995   <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso</a></li>
2996   <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso</a></li>
2997   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso .</li>
2998 </ul>
2999
3000 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 25e808e403a4c15dbef1d13c37d572ac
3001 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 15ecfc93eb6b4f453b7eb0bc04b6a279262d9721</p>
3002
3003 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
3004
3005 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
3006
3007       </div>
3008       <div class="tags">
3009
3010
3011         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3012
3013
3014       </div>
3015     </div>
3016     <div class="padding"></div>
3017
3018     <div class="entry">
3019       <div class="title">
3020         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html">Automatically locate and install required firmware packages on Debian (Isenkram 0.4)</a>
3021       </div>
3022       <div class="date">
3023         25th June 2013
3024       </div>
3025       <div class="body">
3026         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
3027 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
3028 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
3029 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
3030 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
3031 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
3032 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
3033 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
3034 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
3035 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
3036 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
3037
3038 <p><pre>
3039 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
3040 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
3041 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
3042 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
3043 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
3044 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
3045 firmware-ipw2x00
3046 firmware-ipw2x00
3047 Preconfiguring packages ...
3048 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
3049 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
3050 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
3051 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
3052 #
3053 </pre></p>
3054
3055 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
3056 printed instead:</p>
3057
3058 <p><pre>
3059 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
3060 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
3061 #
3062 </pre></p>
3063
3064 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
3065 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
3066
3067 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
3068 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
3069 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
3070 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
3071 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
3072 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
3073 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
3074 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
3075 machine.</p>
3076
3077 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
3078 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
3079 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
3080 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
3081 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
3082 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
3083
3084       </div>
3085       <div class="tags">
3086
3087
3088         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
3089
3090
3091       </div>
3092     </div>
3093     <div class="padding"></div>
3094
3095     <div class="entry">
3096       <div class="title">
3097         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_value_of_a_good_distro_wide_test_suite___.html">The value of a good distro wide test suite...</a>
3098       </div>
3099       <div class="date">
3100         22nd June 2013
3101       </div>
3102       <div class="body">
3103         <p>In the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
3104 Skolelinux</a> project, we include a post-installation test suite,
3105 which check that services are running, working, and return the
3106 expected results.  It runs automatically just after the first boot on
3107 test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
3108 installations (using non-test ISOs).  It test that the LDAP service is
3109 operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
3110 online resizable, etc, etc.  And it check that the PXE service is
3111 configured, which is the topic of this post.</p>
3112
3113 <p>The last week I've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
3114 Edu Wheezy release.  These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
3115 complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
3116 happen all the needed packages need to be on them.  Thanks to our test
3117 suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
3118 cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
3119 When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
3120 using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
3121 working packages to get it working.  And the packages changed name
3122 from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
3123 debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
3124 packages during installation.  Without our test suite, I suspect we
3125 would never have discovered this before release.  Now it is fixed
3126 right after we got the ISOs operational.</p>
3127
3128 <p>Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
3129 administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
3130 test suite using <tt>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install</tt> and see if
3131 any errors are detected.  This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
3132 the problem.</p>
3133
3134 <p>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
3135 please join us on
3136 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
3137 irc.debian.org</a> and the
3138 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@</a> mailing
3139 list.</p>
3140
3141       </div>
3142       <div class="tags">
3143
3144
3145         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3146
3147
3148       </div>
3149     </div>
3150     <div class="padding"></div>
3151
3152     <div class="entry">
3153       <div class="title">
3154         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html">Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu</a>
3155       </div>
3156       <div class="date">
3157         17th June 2013
3158       </div>
3159       <div class="body">
3160         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
3161 Skolelinux</a> distribution have users and contributors all around the
3162 globe.  And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
3163 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">our IRC channel
3164 #debian-edu</a> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
3165 worked.  We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
3166 help us with translations.  And today I managed to get an interview
3167 with him, to learn more about him.</p>
3168
3169 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
3170
3171 <p>I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
3172 which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
3173 party, I had a very nice <strike>beer</strike> discussion with a
3174 friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
3175 country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
3176 community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
3177 began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
3178 constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
3179 field.</p>
3180
3181 <p>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
3182 provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
3183 activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
3184 of <a href="http://ceata.org/">Fundația Ceata</a>, which is a free
3185 software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
3186 the only one we have in our country.</p>
3187
3188 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
3189 project?</strong></p>
3190
3191 <p>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
3192 even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
3193 it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
3194 educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
3195 love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
3196 technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
3197 ways to contribute.</p>
3198
3199 <p>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
3200 configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
3201 haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
3202 areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
3203 software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
3204 one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
3205 environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
3206 for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
3207 from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
3208 have a pretty consistent starting point.</p>
3209
3210 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
3211 Edu?</strong></p>
3212
3213 <p>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
3214 maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
3215 took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
3216 Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
3217 time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
3218 with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
3219 out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
3220 it comes to managing a school's network, for example.</p>
3221
3222 <p>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
3223 availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
3224 scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
3225 only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
3226 lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
3227 project.</p>
3228
3229 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3230 Edu?</strong></p>
3231
3232 <p>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
3233 disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
3234 project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
3235 a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story.  I'd like to see
3236 Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
3237 ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
3238 lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
3239 opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
3240 to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!</p>
3241
3242 <p>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
3243 with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
3244 to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
3245 on.</p>
3246
3247 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
3248
3249 <p>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
3250 daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
3251 am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
3252 Enlightenment project a lot!),
3253 <a href="http://www.claws-mail.org/‎">Claws Mail</a> due to its ease of
3254 use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
3255 <a href="https://launchpad.net/redshift">Redshift</a>, which helps me
3256 get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
3257 stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!</p>
3258
3259 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
3260 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
3261
3262 <p>Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
3263 now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
3264 that:</p>
3265
3266 <ul>
3267
3268 <li>schools would like to get rid of proprietary software</li>
3269
3270 <li>students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
3271     experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
3272     of teenagers more?</li>
3273
3274 <li>there is no "right one" when it comes to strategies, but it would
3275     be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
3276     other can get some inspiration from them (I know I'd promote
3277     them!)</li>
3278
3279 <li>more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
3280     lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
3281     person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)</li>
3282
3283 </ul>
3284
3285 <p>I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
3286 example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
3287 it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
3288 people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
3289 very hard to convert against their will.</p>
3290
3291       </div>
3292       <div class="tags">
3293
3294
3295         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
3296
3297
3298       </div>
3299     </div>
3300     <div class="padding"></div>
3301
3302     <div class="entry">
3303       <div class="title">
3304         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jonathan_Carter.html">Debian Edu interview: Jonathan Carter</a>
3305       </div>
3306       <div class="date">
3307         12th June 2013
3308       </div>
3309       <div class="body">
3310         <p>There is a certain cross-over between the
3311 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
3312 project</a> and <a href="http://www.edubuntu.org/">the Edubuntu
3313 project</a>, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint
3314 effort between the projects.  One person with a foot in both camps is
3315 Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.</p>
3316
3317 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
3318
3319 <p>I'm a South-African free software geek who lives in Cape Town. My
3320 days vary quite a bit since I'm involved in too many things. As I'm
3321 getting older I'm learning how to focus a bit more :)</p>
3322
3323 <p>I'm also an Edubuntu contributor and I love when there are
3324 opportunities for the Edubuntu and Debian Edu projects to benefit from
3325 each other.</p>
3326
3327 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
3328 project?</strong></p>
3329
3330 <p>I've been somewhat familiar with the project before, but I think my
3331 first direct exposure to the project was when I met Petter
3332 [Reinholdtsen] and Knut [Yrvin] at the Edubuntu summit in 2005 in
3333 London. They provided great feedback that helped the bootstrapping of
3334 Edubuntu. Back then Edubuntu (and even Ubuntu) was still very new and
3335 it was great getting input from people who have been around longer. I
3336 was also still very excitable and said yes to everything and to this
3337 day I have a big todo list backlog that I'm catching up with. I think
3338 over the years the relationship between Edubuntu and Debian-Edu has
3339 been gradually improving, although I think there's a lot that we could
3340 still improve on in terms of working together on packages. I'm sure
3341 we'll get there one day.</p>
3342
3343 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3344 Edu?</strong></p>
3345
3346 <p>Debian itself already has so many advantages. I could go on about
3347 it for pages, but in essence I love that it's a very honest project
3348 that puts its users first with no hidden agendas and also produces
3349 very high quality work.</p>
3350
3351 <p>I think the advantage of Debian Edu is that it makes many common
3352 set-up tasks simpler so that administrators can get up and running
3353 with a lot less effort and frustration. At the same time I think it
3354 helps to standardise installations in schools so that it's easier for
3355 community members and commercial suppliers to support.</p>
3356
3357 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3358 Edu?</strong></p>
3359
3360 <p>I had to re-type this one a few times because I'm trying to
3361 separate "disadvantages" from "areas that need improvement" (which is
3362 what I originally rambled on about)</p>
3363
3364 <p>The biggest disadvantage I can think of is lack of manpower. The
3365 project could do so much more if there were more good contributors. I
3366 think some of the problems are external too. Free software and free
3367 content in education is a no-brainer but it takes some time to catch
3368 on. When you've been working with the same proprietary eco-system for
3369 years and have gotten used to it, it can be hard to adjust to some
3370 concepts in the free software world. It would be nice if there were
3371 more Debian Edu consultants across the world. I'd love to be one
3372 myself but I'm already so over-committed that it's just not possible
3373 currently.</p>
3374
3375 <p>I think the best short-term solution to that large-scale problem is
3376 for schools to be pro-active and share their experiences and grow
3377 their skills in-house. I'm often saddened to see how much money
3378 educational institutions spend on 3rd party solutions that they don't
3379 have access to after the service has ended and they could've gotten so
3380 much more value otherwise by being more self-sustainable and
3381 autonomous.</p>
3382
3383 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
3384
3385 <p>My main laptop dual-boots between Debian and Windows 7. I was
3386 Windows free for years but started dual-booting again last year for
3387 some games which help me focus and relax (Starcraft II in
3388 particular). Gaming support on Linux is improving in leaps and bounds
3389 so I suppose I'll soon be able to regain that disk space :)</p>
3390
3391 <p>Besides that I rely on Icedove, Chromium, Terminator, Byobu, irssi,
3392 git, Tomboy, KVM, VLC and LibreOffice. Recently I've been torn on
3393 which desktop environment I like and I'm taking some refuge in Xfce
3394 while I figure that out. I like tools that keep things simple. I enjoy
3395 Python and shell scripting. I went to an Arduino workshop recently and
3396 it was awesome seeing how easy and simple the IDE software was to get
3397 up and running in Debian compared to the users running Windows and OS
3398 X.</p>
3399
3400 <p>I also use mc which some people frown upon slightly. I got used to
3401 using Norton Commander in the early 90's and it stuck (I think the
3402 people who sneer at it is just jealous that they don't know how to use
3403 it :p)
3404
3405 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
3406 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
3407
3408 <p>I think trying to force it is unproductive. I also think that in
3409 many cases it's appropriate for schools to use non-free systems and I
3410 don't think that there's any particular moral or ethical problem with
3411 that.</p>
3412
3413 <p>I do think though that free software can already solve so so many
3414 problems in educational institutions and it's just a shame not taking
3415 advantage of that.</p>
3416
3417 <p>I also think that some curricula need serious review. For example,
3418 some areas of the world rely heavily on very specific versions of MS
3419 Office, teaching students to parrot menu items instead of learning the
3420 general concepts. I think that's very unproductive because firstly, MS
3421 Office's interface changes drastically every few years and on top of
3422 that it also locks in a generation to a product that might not be the
3423 best solution for them.</p>
3424
3425 <p>To answer your question, I believe that the right strategy is to
3426 educate and inform, giving someone the information they require to
3427 make a decision that would work for them.</p>
3428
3429       </div>
3430       <div class="tags">
3431
3432
3433         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
3434
3435
3436       </div>
3437     </div>
3438     <div class="padding"></div>
3439
3440     <div class="entry">
3441       <div class="title">
3442         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_the_Linux_black_screen_of_death_on_machines_with_Intel_HD_video.html">Fixing the Linux black screen of death on machines with Intel HD video</a>
3443       </div>
3444       <div class="date">
3445         11th June 2013
3446       </div>
3447       <div class="body">
3448         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
3449 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
3450 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
3451 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
3452 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
3453 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
3454 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
3455 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
3456 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
3457 i915 driver used by the
3458 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
3459 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
3460
3461 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
3462 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
3463 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
3464 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
3465 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
3466
3467 <pre>
3468 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
3469 update-initramfs -u -k all
3470 </pre>
3471
3472 <p>Since March 2012 there is
3473 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
3474 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
3475 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
3476 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
3477 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
3478 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
3479 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
3480 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
3481 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
3482 number.</p>
3483
3484 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
3485 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
3486
3487 <p><pre>
3488 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
3489     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
3490     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
3491  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
3492  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
3493     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
3494  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
3495     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
3496  Latency: 0
3497  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
3498  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
3499  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
3500  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
3501  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
3502  Capabilities: <access denied>
3503  Kernel driver in use: i915
3504 </pre></p>
3505
3506 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
3507
3508 <p><pre>
3509 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
3510        ...
3511         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
3512         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
3513        ...
3514 }
3515 </pre></p>
3516
3517 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
3518 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
3519 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
3520 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
3521 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
3522 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
3523 yet shown up in
3524 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
3525 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
3526 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
3527 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
3528 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
3529 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
3530
3531 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
3532 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
3533 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
3534 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
3535 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
3536 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
3537 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
3538 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
3539 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
3540 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
3541 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
3542 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
3543
3544 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
3545 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
3546 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
3547 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
3548 backlight.</p>
3549
3550       </div>
3551       <div class="tags">
3552
3553
3554         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3555
3556
3557       </div>
3558     </div>
3559     <div class="padding"></div>
3560
3561     <div class="entry">
3562       <div class="title">
3563         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">Third alpha release of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
3564       </div>
3565       <div class="date">
3566         10th June 2013
3567       </div>
3568       <div class="body">
3569         <p>The third wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
3570 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
3571
3572 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha2 released
3573 2013-06-10</strong></p>
3574
3575 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
3576 alpha2, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
3577
3578 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
3579
3580 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
3581 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
3582 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
3583 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
3584 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
3585 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
3586 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
3587 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
3588 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
3589 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
3590 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
3591 desktop contains
3592 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
3593 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
3594 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
3595 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
3596
3597 <p>This is the third test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
3598 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
3599 Squeeze release.</p>
3600
3601 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
3602
3603 <ul>
3604
3605 <li>Iceweasel was updated from 10 to 17. (DSA 2699-1)
3606 <li>Updated libxv (DSA-2674), libxvmc (DSA-2675), libxfixes (DSA-2676), libxrender (DSA-2677), mesa (DSA-2678), xserver-xorg-video-openchrome (DSA-2679), libxt (DSA-2680), libxcursor (DSA-2681), libxext (DSA-2682), libxi (DSA-2683), libxrandr (DSA-2684), libxp (DSA-2685), libxcb (DSA-2686), libfs (DSA-2687), libxres (DSA-2688), libxtst (DSA-2689), libxxf86dga (DSA-2690), libxinerama (DSA-2691), libxxf86vm (DSA-2692), libx11 (DSA-2693), chromium-browser (DSA-2695), gnutls26 (DSA-2697), wireshark (DSA-2700), krb5 (DSA-2701), telepathy-gabble (DSA-2702) and subversion (DSA-2703).
3607 <li>Switched xrdp on thin client servers to use tightvncserver instead of xvnc4.
3608 <li>Now install software oscilloscope xoscope by default.
3609 <li>Now install music tools gtick, lingot and pianobooster by default.
3610
3611 </ul>
3612
3613 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
3614
3615 <ul>
3616
3617 <li>The subnet-change script is now able to change all files needing a change on the main-server when changing the IP network used.
3618 <li>Updated translation of the installation.
3619 <li>New Romanian translation.
3620 <li>Fix security problem causing root and first user password to no longer show up in /var/cache/debconf/templates.dat.
3621 <li>Fix roaming workstation setup (Closed in libpam-mklocaluser/0.8, libpam-mklocaluser/0.8~deb7u1: #706753: libpam-mklocaluser: Fail to create local user during first login).
3622 <li>Made roaming workstation setup more robust in non-Debian Edu environments.
3623 <li>New script debian-edu-bless to transform a Debian installation to a Debian Edu profile.
3624 <li>Adjust Iceweasel setup to improve performance when $HOME is on NFS.
3625 <li>More testsuite tests.
3626 <li>Make automatic proxy configuration more robust.
3627 <li>Adjust GOsa² GUI configuration.
3628
3629 <li>Update thin client and diskless workstation setup to work with
3630 LTSP in Wheezy.</li>
3631
3632 <li>Diskless workstations now run out of the box -- no need to set
3633 them up with GOsa².</li>
3634
3635 <li>Update IMAP server setup. </li>
3636
3637 <li>Fix login into Skolelinux Backup Tool (Closed in
3638 slbackup-php/0.4.4-1: #700257: slbackup-php: Fails to submit correctly
3639 entered password). </li>
3640
3641 </ul>
3642
3643 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
3644
3645 <ul>
3646
3647 <li>DVD binary and source images are not yet ready.</li>
3648
3649 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
3650 available yet (Open in gosa/2.7.4-4: #698840: gosa-plugin-ldapmanager:
3651 missing import feature).</li>
3652
3653 <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others). </li>
3654
3655 <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons (Closed: #502192: menu-xdg: invents
3656 own icon names instead of using existing). This will remain
3657 unfixed.</li>
3658
3659 </ul>
3660
3661 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
3662
3663 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
3664
3665 <ul>
3666
3667 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso</a></li>
3668
3669 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso</a></li>
3670
3671 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso .</li>
3672
3673 </ul>
3674
3675 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 27bbcace407743382f3c42c08dbe8178
3676 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: e35f7d7908566cd3075375b3721fa10ee420d419</p>
3677
3678 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
3679
3680 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
3681
3682       </div>
3683       <div class="tags">
3684
3685
3686         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3687
3688
3689       </div>
3690     </div>
3691     <div class="padding"></div>
3692
3693     <div class="entry">
3694       <div class="title">
3695         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_there_a_PHP_expert_in_the_building___Debian_Edu_need_help_.html">Is there a PHP expert in the building?  Debian Edu need help!</a>
3696       </div>
3697       <div class="date">
3698          5th June 2013
3699       </div>
3700       <div class="body">
3701         <p>Here is a call for help from the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project.
3702 We have two problems blocking the release of the Wheezy version we
3703 hope to get released soon.  The two problems require some with PHP
3704 skills, and we seem to lack anyone with both time and PHP skills in
3705 the project:
3706
3707 <ol>
3708
3709 <li>It is impossible to log into the slbackup web interface
3710   (slbackup-php) using the root user and password.  This is
3711   <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">BTS report #700257</a>.
3712   This used to work, but stopped working some time since Squeeze.
3713   Perhaps some obsolete PHP feature was used?</li>
3714
3715 <li>It is not possible to "mass import" user lists in Gosa, neither
3716   using ldif nor using CSV files.  The feature was disabled after a
3717   major rewrite of Gosa, and need to be ported to the new system.
3718   This is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">BTS report
3719   #698840</a>.</li>
3720
3721 </ol>
3722
3723 <p>If you can help us, please join us on IRC
3724 (<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
3725 irc.debian.org</a>) and provide patches via the BTS.</p>
3726
3727       </div>
3728       <div class="tags">
3729
3730
3731         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3732
3733
3734       </div>
3735     </div>
3736     <div class="padding"></div>
3737
3738     <div class="entry">
3739       <div class="title">
3740         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html">Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier</a>
3741       </div>
3742       <div class="date">
3743          4th June 2013
3744       </div>
3745       <div class="body">
3746         <p>It has been a while since my last English
3747 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
3748 interview last November.  But the developers and translators are still
3749 pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
3750 time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
3751 in the project, Cédric Boutillier.</p>
3752
3753 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
3754
3755 <p>I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
3756 professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
3757 mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
3758 probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.</p>
3759
3760 <p>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
3761 and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
3762 packaging, publicity and translation.</p>
3763
3764 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
3765 project?</strong></p>
3766
3767 <p>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
3768 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals">the
3769 Debian Edu manual</a> for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
3770 then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
3771 manual.
3772
3773 <p>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
3774 virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
3775 shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
3776 how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.</p>
3777
3778 <p>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
3779 ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
3780 by <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa²</a>.  What pleased
3781 me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
3782 there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
3783 to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
3784 artistic skills with music (<a href="http://ardour.org/">Ardour</a>,
3785 <a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>) and
3786 movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
3787 <a href="http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/">Stopmotion</a>).</p>
3788
3789 <p>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
3790 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>.
3791 Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
3792 beautiful project.</p>
3793
3794 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3795 Edu?</strong></p>
3796
3797 <p>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
3798 community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
3799 fact that it provides a solution ready to use.</p>
3800
3801 <p>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
3802 distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
3803 of educational free software.</p>
3804
3805 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3806 Edu?</strong></p>
3807
3808 <p>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
3809 project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
3810 not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
3811 solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
3812 is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.</p>
3813
3814 <p>One can find support from a company by looking at
3815 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp">the
3816 wiki dokumentation</a>, where some countries already have a number of
3817 companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
3818 Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
3819 for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
3820 consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
3821 support for Debian Edu as well.</p>
3822
3823 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
3824
3825 <p>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
3826 most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
3827 scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice.  I am
3828 also using the mathematical software
3829 <a href="http://www.scilab.org/en/scilab/about‎">Scilab</a> and
3830 <a href="http://www.sagemath.org/index.html‎">Sage</a> (built from
3831 source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
3832
3833 <p><strong>Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
3834 using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
3835 statistics?</strong></p>
3836
3837 <p>I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
3838 university, we use both <a href="http://www.r-project.org/‎">R</a> and
3839 Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
3840 geometry, there are nice programs:</p>
3841
3842 <ul>
3843
3844 <li><a href="http://www.drgeo.eu/">drgeo</a> and
3845 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/kig‎">kig</a> to do
3846 constructions in planar geometry
3847
3848 <li><a href="http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/kali.html">kali</a>
3849 to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
3850 groups), although the interface looks a bit old.</li>
3851
3852 </ul>
3853
3854 <p>I like also
3855 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/cantor">cantor</a>, which
3856 provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
3857 <a href="http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Octave‎">Octave</a>, etc...</p>
3858
3859 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
3860 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
3861
3862 <p>My suggestions would be to</p>
3863
3864 <ul>
3865
3866 <li>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.</li>
3867
3868 <li>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
3869     well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
3870     OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.</li>
3871
3872 <li>advertise the living and strong community around the project.</li>
3873
3874 <li>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
3875     system.</li>
3876
3877 </ul>
3878
3879       </div>
3880       <div class="tags">
3881
3882
3883         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
3884
3885
3886       </div>
3887     </div>
3888     <div class="padding"></div>
3889
3890     <div class="entry">
3891       <div class="title">
3892         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">Educational applications included in Debian Edu / Skolelinux (the screenshot collection :-)</a>
3893       </div>
3894       <div class="date">
3895          1st June 2013
3896       </div>
3897       <div class="body">
3898         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
3899 Skolelinux</a>, there are quite a lot of educational software.
3900 Created to help teachers teach, and pupils learn.  We have tried to
3901 tag them all using debtags use::learning and role::program, and using
3902 the debtags I was happy to be able to create a collage of the
3903 educational software packages installed by default, sorted by the
3904 debtag field.  Here it is.  Click on a image to learn more about the
3905 program.</p>
3906
3907 <!-- for f in $(debtags tagcat|grep field::|awk '{print $2}'); do   echo; echo "<p><strong>$f</strong></p>"; echo "<p>";   (     for p in $(debtags search --names "use::learning && interface::x11 && role::program && $f"); do img="<img src='http://screenshots.debian.net/thumbnail/$p' alt='$p'>"; if dpkg -s $p > /dev/null 2>&1; then           echo "<a href='http://packages.qa.debian.org/$p'>$img</a>"; fi;     done;   ) | LANG=C sort; echo "</p>"; done -->
3908
3909 <p><strong>field::arts</strong></p>
3910 <p>
3911 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=audacity'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/audacity.png' alt='audacity'></a>
3912 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=childsplay'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/childsplay.png' alt='childsplay'></a>
3913 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=denemo'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/denemo.png' alt='denemo'></a>
3914 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=freebirth'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/freebirth.png' alt='freebirth'></a>
3915 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
3916 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gimp'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gimp.png' alt='gimp'></a>
3917 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=hydrogen'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/hydrogen.png' alt='hydrogen'></a>
3918 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=lilypond'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/lilypond.png' alt='lilypond'></a>
3919 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=lmms'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/lmms.png' alt='lmms'></a>
3920 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=rosegarden'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/rosegarden.png' alt='rosegarden'></a>
3921 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=scribus'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/scribus.png' alt='scribus'></a>
3922 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=solfege'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/solfege.png' alt='solfege'></a>
3923 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=stopmotion'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/stopmotion.png' alt='stopmotion'></a>
3924 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=tuxpaint'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/tuxpaint.png' alt='tuxpaint'></a>
3925 </p>
3926
3927 <p><strong>field::astronomy</strong></p>
3928 <p>
3929 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=celestia-gnome'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/celestia-gnome.png' alt='celestia-gnome'></a>
3930 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gpredict'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gpredict.png' alt='gpredict'></a>
3931 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kstars'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kstars.png' alt='kstars'></a>
3932 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=planets'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/planets.png' alt='planets'></a>
3933 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=stellarium'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/stellarium.png' alt='stellarium'></a>
3934 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=xplanet'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/xplanet.png' alt='xplanet'></a>
3935 </p>
3936
3937 <p><strong>field::biology:structural</strong></p>
3938 <p>
3939 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=pymol'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/pymol.png' alt='pymol'></a>
3940 </p>
3941
3942 <p><strong>field::chemistry</strong></p>
3943 <p>
3944 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=atomix'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/atomix.png' alt='atomix'></a>
3945 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=chemtool'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/chemtool.png' alt='chemtool'></a>
3946 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=easychem'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/easychem.png' alt='easychem'></a>
3947 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gchempaint'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gchempaint.png' alt='gchempaint'></a>
3948 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gdis'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gdis.png' alt='gdis'></a>
3949 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=ghemical'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/ghemical.png' alt='ghemical'></a>
3950 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gperiodic'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gperiodic.png' alt='gperiodic'></a>
3951 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kalzium'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kalzium.png' alt='kalzium'></a>
3952 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=pymol'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/pymol.png' alt='pymol'></a>
3953 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=viewmol'>[viewmol]</a>
3954 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=xdrawchem'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/xdrawchem.png' alt='xdrawchem'></a>
3955 </p>
3956
3957 <p><strong>field::electronics</strong></p>
3958 <p>
3959 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
3960 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gpsim'>[gpsim]</a>
3961 </p>
3962
3963 <p><strong>field::geography</strong></p>
3964 <p>
3965 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kgeography'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kgeography.png' alt='kgeography'></a>
3966 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=marble'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/marble.png' alt='marble'></a>
3967 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=xplanet'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/xplanet.png' alt='xplanet'></a>
3968 </p>
3969
3970 <p><strong>field::linguistics</strong></p>
3971 <p>
3972 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
3973 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kanagram'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kanagram.png' alt='kanagram'></a>
3974 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=khangman'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/khangman.png' alt='khangman'></a>
3975 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=klettres'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/klettres.png' alt='klettres'></a>
3976 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=parley'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/parley.png' alt='parley'></a>
3977 </p>
3978
3979 <p><strong>field::mathematics</strong></p>
3980 <p>
3981 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=childsplay'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/childsplay.png' alt='childsplay'></a>
3982 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=drgeo'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/drgeo.png' alt='drgeo'></a>
3983 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
3984 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=geogebra'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/geogebra.png' alt='geogebra'></a>
3985 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=geomview'>[geomview]</a>
3986 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=grace'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/grace.png' alt='grace'></a>
3987 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=graphmonkey'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/graphmonkey.png' alt='graphmonkey'></a>
3988 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=graphthing'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/graphthing.png' alt='graphthing'></a>
3989 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kalgebra'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kalgebra.png' alt='kalgebra'></a>
3990 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kbruch'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kbruch.png' alt='kbruch'></a>
3991 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kig'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kig.png' alt='kig'></a>
3992 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kmplot'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kmplot.png' alt='kmplot'></a>
3993 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=mathwar'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/mathwar.png' alt='mathwar'></a>
3994 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=rocs'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/rocs.png' alt='rocs'></a>
3995 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=scratch'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/scratch.png' alt='scratch'></a>
3996 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=tuxmath'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/tuxmath.png' alt='tuxmath'></a>
3997 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=xabacus'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/xabacus.png' alt='xabacus'></a>
3998 </p>
3999
4000 <p><strong>field::physics</strong></p>
4001 <p>
4002 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
4003 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=step'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/step.png' alt='step'></a>
4004 </p>
4005
4006 <p><strong>field::TODO</strong></p>
4007 <p>
4008 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=blinken'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/blinken.png' alt='blinken'></a>
4009 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=cgoban'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/cgoban.png' alt='cgoban'></a>
4010 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=childsplay'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/childsplay.png' alt='childsplay'></a>
4011 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
4012 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gnuchess'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gnuchess.png' alt='gnuchess'></a>
4013 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gnugo'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gnugo.png' alt='gnugo'></a>
4014 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gtans'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gtans.png' alt='gtans'></a>
4015 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=ktouch'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/ktouch.png' alt='ktouch'></a>
4016 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=librecad'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/librecad.png' alt='librecad'></a>
4017 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=scratch'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/scratch.png' alt='scratch'></a>
4018 </p>
4019
4020 <p>In total, 61 applications.  3 of them lacked screen shots on
4021 <a href="http://screenshot.debian.net">screenshot.debian.net</a>.  If
4022 you know of some packages we should install by default, please let us
4023 know on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu
4024 on irc.debian.org</a>, or our
4025 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">mailing list
4026 debian-edu@</a>.</p>
4027
4028       </div>
4029       <div class="tags">
4030
4031
4032         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4033
4034
4035       </div>
4036     </div>
4037     <div class="padding"></div>
4038
4039     <div class="entry">
4040       <div class="title">
4041         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8.html">How to install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8</a>
4042       </div>
4043       <div class="date">
4044         27th May 2013
4045       </div>
4046       <div class="body">
4047         <p>Two days ago, I asked
4048 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">how
4049 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
4050 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
4051 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
4052 and Windows 8.</p>
4053
4054 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
4055 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
4056 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
4057 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
4058 enough to tell.</p>
4059
4060 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
4061 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
4062 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
4063 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
4064 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
4065 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
4066 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
4067 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
4068 to follow.</p>
4069
4070 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
4071 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
4072 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
4073 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
4074 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
4075 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
4076 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
4077 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
4078
4079 <p>I've updated the
4080 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
4081 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
4082 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
4083 machine.</p>
4084
4085 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
4086 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
4087
4088       </div>
4089       <div class="tags">
4090
4091
4092         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4093
4094
4095       </div>
4096     </div>
4097     <div class="padding"></div>
4098
4099     <div class="entry">
4100       <div class="title">
4101         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">How can I install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8?</a>
4102       </div>
4103       <div class="date">
4104         25th May 2013
4105       </div>
4106       <div class="body">
4107         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
4108 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
4109 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
4110 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
4111 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
4112 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
4113
4114 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
4115 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
4116 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
4117 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
4118 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
4119 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
4120 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
4121 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
4122 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
4123 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
4124
4125 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
4126 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
4127 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
4128 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
4129 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
4130 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
4131
4132 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
4133 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
4134 on new Laptops?</p>
4135
4136       </div>
4137       <div class="tags">
4138
4139
4140         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4141
4142
4143       </div>
4144     </div>
4145     <div class="padding"></div>
4146
4147     <div class="entry">
4148       <div class="title">
4149         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_transform_a_Debian_based_system_to_a_Debian_Edu_installation.html">How to transform a Debian based system to a Debian Edu installation</a>
4150       </div>
4151       <div class="date">
4152         17th May 2013
4153       </div>
4154       <div class="body">
4155         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
4156 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
4157 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
4158 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
4159 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
4160 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
4161 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
4162 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
4163 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
4164 donate some money</a>.
4165
4166 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
4167 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
4168 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
4169 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
4170 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
4171
4172 <p>The script,
4173 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/branches/wheezy/debian-edu-config/share/debian-edu-config/tools/debian-edu-bless?view=markup">debian-edu-bless<a/>
4174 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
4175 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
4176 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
4177
4178 <ol>
4179
4180 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
4181 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
4182 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
4183     our configuration.</li>
4184 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
4185     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
4186     according to the profile specified in the config above,
4187     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
4188 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
4189     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
4190 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
4191
4192 </ol>
4193
4194 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
4195 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
4196 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
4197 the needed packages.</p>
4198
4199 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
4200 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
4201 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
4202 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
4203 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
4204 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
4205
4206 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
4207 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
4208 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
4209
4210 <p><pre>
4211 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
4212 DESKTOP="lxde"
4213 </pre></p>
4214
4215 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
4216 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
4217 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
4218 boot.</p>
4219
4220       </div>
4221       <div class="tags">
4222
4223
4224         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4225
4226
4227       </div>
4228     </div>
4229     <div class="padding"></div>
4230
4231     <div class="entry">
4232       <div class="title">
4233         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">Second alpha release of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
4234       </div>
4235       <div class="date">
4236         14th May 2013
4237       </div>
4238       <div class="body">
4239         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
4240 project</a> is making great progress and made its second Wheezy based
4241 release today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
4242
4243 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha1 released
4244 2013-05-14</strong></p>
4245
4246 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
4247 alpha1, based on <a href="http://www.debian.org">Debian</a> with
4248 codename "Wheezy".</p>
4249
4250 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
4251
4252 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
4253 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
4254 configured school network. Immediatly after installation a school
4255 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
4256 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
4257 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
4258 initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all
4259 other machines can be installed via the network.</p>
4260
4261 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
4262 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
4263 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
4264
4265 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
4266 <ul>
4267   <li>Install freemind (0.9.0) by default, and stop installing vym by
4268     default.</li>
4269   <li>Install chromium (26.0.1410.43) by default.</li>
4270   <li>Install goplay (0.5-1.1) to make golearn available by default.</li>
4271   <li>Updated support for Japanese input methods, now based on
4272     ibus-anthy.</li>
4273 </ul>
4274
4275 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
4276 <ul>
4277
4278   <li>Switched default file system from ext3 to ext4 for speed and
4279     reliability improvements.</li>
4280   <li>Got rid of unwanted winbind daemon and PAM setup activated because
4281     of <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706434">706434</a>.</li>
4282   <li>Extended and improved the testsuite tests to detect more possible
4283     problems.</li>
4284   <li>Corrected proxy handling to not set http_proxy to a bogus
4285     direct:// URL.</li>
4286   <li>Corrected proxy setup for diskless workstations.</li>
4287   <li>Corrected PXE setup to use our updated udebs during installation.</li>
4288   <li>Made installation handling of low entropy level more robust.</li>
4289   <li>Create larger partitions for Roaming workstations and Thin client
4290     servers, to make room for all the software installed.</li>
4291   <li>Fix bug in Roaming workstation PAM setup, making it impossible to
4292     log in (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706753">706753</a>).</li>
4293 </ul>
4294
4295 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
4296 <ul>
4297
4298   <li>IP resolution for the local hostname give useless IPv6 address
4299     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/705900">705900</a>).  Only install
4300     libnss-myhostname on roaming workstations until it is fixed.</li>
4301   <li>DVD images are not yet ready.</li>
4302   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
4303     available yet (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">698840</a>).</li>
4304   <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others).</li>
4305   <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons.</li>
4306   <li>LXDE menu lacks entry for changing GOsa password
4307     (website). Installing gosa-desktop will be an option.</li>
4308   <li>Backup configuration via web interface is impossible due to
4309     password submission problem
4310     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">700257</a>).</li>
4311
4312 </ul>
4313
4314 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
4315
4316 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
4317 <ul>
4318
4319   <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso</a></li>
4320   <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso</a></li>
4321   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso</li>
4322
4323 </ul>
4324
4325 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 685ed76c1aa8e44b12d3fde21faf450b</p>
4326
4327 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 6c874de157024da13e115bab29c068080a11ec4c</p>
4328
4329 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
4330
4331 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
4332
4333       </div>
4334       <div class="tags">
4335
4336
4337         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4338
4339
4340       </div>
4341     </div>
4342     <div class="padding"></div>
4343
4344     <div class="entry">
4345       <div class="title">
4346         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian__the_Linux_distribution_of_choice_for_LEGO_designers_.html">Debian, the Linux distribution of choice for LEGO designers?</a>
4347       </div>
4348       <div class="date">
4349         11th May 2013
4350       </div>
4351       <div class="body">
4352         <P>In January,
4353 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
4354 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
4355 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
4356 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
4357 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
4358 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
4359 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
4360 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
4361 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
4362 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
4363 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
4364 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
4365
4366 <p><table>
4367 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/brickos">brickos</a></td><td>alternative OS for LEGO Mindstorms RCX. Supports development in C/C++</td></tr>
4368 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
4369 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libnxt">libnxt</a></td><td>utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NX</td></tr>
4370 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
4371 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
4372 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
4373 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt">python-nxt</a></td><td>python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot</td></tr>
4374 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt-filer">python-nxt-filer</a></td><td>simple GUI to manage files on a LEGO Mindstorms NXT</td></tr>
4375 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/scratch">scratch</a></td><td>easy to use programming environment for ages 8 and up</td></tr>
4376 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
4377 </table></p>
4378
4379 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
4380 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
4381 available in experimental.</p>
4382
4383 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
4384 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
4385 for LEGO designers.</p>
4386
4387       </div>
4388       <div class="tags">
4389
4390
4391         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
4392
4393
4394       </div>
4395     </div>
4396     <div class="padding"></div>
4397
4398     <div class="entry">
4399       <div class="title">
4400         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Wheezy_is_out___and_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_should_soon_follow___newinwheezy.html">Debian Wheezy is out - and Debian Edu / Skolelinux should soon follow! #newinwheezy</a>
4401       </div>
4402       <div class="date">
4403          5th May 2013
4404       </div>
4405       <div class="body">
4406         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
4407 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
4408 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
4409 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
4410 soon.</p>
4411
4412 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
4413 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
4414 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
4415 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
4416 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
4417 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
4418 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
4419 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
4420 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
4421 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
4422 Edu.</a>
4423
4424 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
4425 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
4426 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
4427 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
4428 follow.<p>
4429
4430       </div>
4431       <div class="tags">
4432
4433
4434         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4435
4436
4437       </div>
4438     </div>
4439     <div class="padding"></div>
4440
4441     <div class="entry">
4442       <div class="title">
4443         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">First alpha release of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
4444       </div>
4445       <div class="date">
4446         26th April 2013
4447       </div>
4448       <div class="body">
4449         <p>The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made
4450 its first Wheezy based release today.  This is the release
4451 announcement:</p>
4452
4453 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu ~7.0.0 alpha0 released
4454 2013-04-26</strong></p>
4455
4456 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux ~7.0.0
4457 edu alpha0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
4458
4459 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
4460
4461 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
4462 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
4463 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
4464 network. Immediatly after installation a school server running all
4465 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
4466 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
4467 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
4468 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
4469 installed via the network.</p>
4470
4471 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
4472 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
4473 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
4474
4475 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
4476
4477 <ul>
4478 <li>Everything which is new in Debian Wheezy, eg:
4479   <ul>
4480      <li>Linux kernel 3.2.x</li>
4481      <li>Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.8.4, GNOME 3.4, and LXDE 4
4482          (KDE is installed by default; to choose GNOME or LXDE: see
4483          manual.)</li>
4484      <li>Web browser Iceweasel 10 ESR</li>
4485      <li>LibreOffice 3.5.4</li>
4486      <li>LTSP 5.4.2</li>
4487      <li>GOsa 2.7.4</li>
4488      <li>CUPS print system 1.5.3</li>
4489      <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 12.01</li>
4490      <li>Music creator Rosegarden 12.04</li>
4491      <li>Image editor Gimp 2.8.2</li>
4492      <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.1</li>
4493      <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.11.3</li>
4494      <li>Scratch visual programming environment 1.4.0.6</li>
4495      <li>New version of debian-installer from Debian Wheezy, see
4496          <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual">installation
4497          manual</a> for more details.</li>
4498      <li>Debian Wheezy includes about 37000 packages available for
4499          installation.</li>
4500      <li>More information about Debian Wheezy 7.0 is provided in the
4501          <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/releasenotes">release notes</a> and the <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual">installation manual</a>.</li>
4502   </ul></li>
4503 </ul>
4504
4505 <p><strong>Documentation</strong></p>
4506 <ul>
4507 <li>The (<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy">English</a>) Debian Edu Wheezy Manual is fully translated to
4508     German, French, Italian and Danish. Partly translated versions exist
4509     for Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.</li>
4510 </ul>
4511
4512 <p><Strong>LDAP related changes</strong></p>
4513 <ul>
4514 <li>Slight changes to some objects and acls to have more types to
4515     choose from when adding systems in GOsa. Now systems can be of type
4516     server, workstation, printer, terminal or netdevice.</li>
4517 </ul>
4518
4519 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
4520 <ul>
4521 <li>LTSP clients start as diskless workstation / thin client can be
4522     configured via command line argument -- or individually adding an
4523     entry in lts.conf or LDAP.<li>
4524 <li>GOsa gui: Now some options that seemed to be available, but are non
4525     functional, are greyed out (or are not clickable). Some tabs are
4526     completely hidden to the end user, others even to the GOsa admin.</li>
4527 </ul>
4528
4529 <p><strong>Regressions</strong></p>
4530 <ul>
4531 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv) available
4532     yet.</li>
4533 </ul>
4534
4535 <p><strong>No updated artwork</strong></p>
4536
4537 <ul>
4538 <li>Updated artwork which is visible during installation, in the login
4539     screen and as desktop wallpaper is still missing or the same as we
4540     had for our Squeeze based release.</li>
4541 </ul>
4542
4543 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
4544
4545 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
4546 <ul>
4547 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
4548 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
4549 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</li>
4550 </ul>
4551
4552 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: c5e773ddafdaa4f48c409c682f598b6c</p>
4553
4554 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 25934fabb9b7d20235499a0a51f08ce6c54215f2</p>
4555
4556 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
4557
4558 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
4559
4560       </div>
4561       <div class="tags">
4562
4563
4564         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4565
4566
4567       </div>
4568     </div>
4569     <div class="padding"></div>
4570
4571     <div class="entry">
4572       <div class="title">
4573         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_developer_gathering_in_2013_take_place_in_Trondheim.html">First Debian Edu / Skolelinux developer gathering in 2013 take place in Trondheim</a>
4574       </div>
4575       <div class="date">
4576         16th April 2013
4577       </div>
4578       <div class="body">
4579         <p>This years first <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux /
4580 Debian Edu</a> developer gathering take place the coming weekend in Trondheim.
4581 Details about the gathering can be found
4582 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2013-04-19-21-Trondheim">on
4583 the FRiSK wiki</a>.  The dates are 19-21th of April 2013, and online
4584 participation for those unable to make it in person is very welcome,
4585 and I plan to participate online myself as I could not leave Oslo this
4586 weekend.</p>
4587
4588 <p>The focus of the gathering is to work on the web pages and project
4589 infrastructure, and to continue the work on the Wheezy based Debian
4590 Edu release.</p>
4591
4592 <p>See you on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu on irc.debian.org,</a> then?</p>
4593
4594       </div>
4595       <div class="tags">
4596
4597
4598         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4599
4600
4601       </div>
4602     </div>
4603     <div class="padding"></div>
4604
4605     <div class="entry">
4606       <div class="title">
4607         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html">Isenkram 0.2 finally in the Debian archive</a>
4608       </div>
4609       <div class="date">
4610          3rd April 2013
4611       </div>
4612       <div class="body">
4613         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
4614 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
4615 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
4616 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
4617
4618 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
4619 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
4620 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
4621 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
4622 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
4623 BTS. :)</p>
4624
4625       </div>
4626       <div class="tags">
4627
4628
4629         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
4630
4631
4632       </div>
4633     </div>
4634     <div class="padding"></div>
4635
4636     <div class="entry">
4637       <div class="title">
4638         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Change_the_font__save_the_world__and_save_some_money_in_the_process_.html">Change the font, save the world (and save some money in the process)</a>
4639       </div>
4640       <div class="date">
4641         26th March 2013
4642       </div>
4643       <div class="body">
4644         <p>Would you like to help the environment and save money at the same
4645 time, without much sacrifice?  A small step could be to change the
4646 font you use when printing.</p>
4647
4648 <p>Three years ago,
4649 <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/04/last-year-printer-comparison-website/">Ars
4650 Technica</a> reported how the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
4651 changed their default front from
4652 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial">Arial</a> to
4653 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Gothic">Century
4654 Gothic</a> to save money.  The Century Gothic font uses 30% less toner
4655 than Arial to print the same text.  In other word, you could cut your
4656 toner costs by 30% (or actually, increase your toner supply life time
4657 by more than 30%), by simply changing the default font used in your
4658 prints.</p>
4659
4660 <p>But it is not quite obvious how much one will save by switching.
4661 The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay said it used $100,000 per year
4662 on ink and toner cartridges, according to
4663 <a href="http://www.twincities.com/ci_14833097">a report from
4664 TwinCities.com</a>, and expected to save between $5,000 and $10,000
4665 per year by asking staff and students to use a different font.  Not
4666 all PDFs and documents are created internally, and those from external
4667 sources will most likely still use a different font.  Also, the
4668 Century Gothic font is slightly wider than Arial, and thus might use
4669 more sheets of paper to print the same text, so the total saving
4670 depend on the documents printed.</p>
4671
4672 <p>But it is definitely something to consider, if you want to reduce
4673 the amount of trash, decrease the amount of toner used in the world,
4674 and save some money in the process.</p>
4675
4676 <p>Update 2013-04-10: If you want to know how much ink/toner could be
4677 saved when switching between fonts, Inkfarm got a
4678 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/What-the-Font">service to calculate the
4679 difference between font pairs</a>.  They also
4680 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/Recommended-Ink-Saving-Fonts---">recommend
4681 which fonts to use</a> to save ink.  Check it out. :) While updating
4682 this blog post, I also came across a blog post from InkCloners,
4683 <a href="http://inkcloners.com/blog/ink-cartridges/change-fonts-to-save-ink-costs/">listing
4684 the fonts they recommend</a>, with Centory Gothic at the top.</p>
4685
4686       </div>
4687       <div class="tags">
4688
4689
4690         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4691
4692
4693       </div>
4694     </div>
4695     <div class="padding"></div>
4696
4697     <div class="entry">
4698       <div class="title">
4699         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_a_short_story_using_docbook_for_PDF__HTML_and_EPUB.html">Typesetting a short story using docbook for PDF, HTML and EPUB</a>
4700       </div>
4701       <div class="date">
4702         24th March 2013
4703       </div>
4704       <div class="body">
4705         <p>A few days ago, during a discussion in
4706 <a href="http://www.efn.no/">EFN</a> about interesting books to read
4707 about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
4708 the 1968 short story Kodémus by
4709 <a href="http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/">Tore Åge Bringsværd</a>
4710 came up.  The text was only available in old paper books, and thus not
4711 easily available for current and future generations.  Some of the
4712 people participating in the discussion contacted the author, and
4713 reported back 2013-03-19 that the author was OK with releasing the
4714 short story using a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative
4715 Commons</a> license.  The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
4716 were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.</p>
4717
4718 <p>As I already had some experience formatting text in my project to
4719 provide a Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence
4720 Lessig, I chipped in and set up a
4721 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">DocBook</a> processing framework to
4722 generate PDF, HTML and EPUB version of the short story.  The tools to
4723 transform DocBook to different formats are already in my Linux
4724 distribution of choice, <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>, so
4725 all I had to do was to use the
4726 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a>,
4727 <a href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README">dbtoepub</a>
4728 and <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/">xmlto</a> tools to do the
4729 conversion.  After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
4730 xsltproc/fop (aka
4731 <a href="http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets">docbook-xsl</a>),
4732 to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
4733 nicer &lt;variablelist&gt; typesetting, but that is just a minor
4734 technical detail.</p>
4735
4736 <p>There were a few challenges, of course.  We want to typeset the
4737 short story to look like the original, and that require fairly good
4738 control over the layout.  The original short story have three
4739 parts/scenes separated by a single horizontally centred star (*), and
4740 the paragraphs do not contain only flowing text, but dialogs and text
4741 that started on a new line in the middle of the paragraph.</p>
4742
4743 <p>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
4744 single star in it, ie &lt;para&gt;*&lt;/para&gt;, but it made sure a
4745 placeholder indicated where the scene shifted.  This did not look too
4746 good without the centring.  The next approach was to create a new
4747 preprocessor directive &lt;?newscene?&gt;, mapping to "&lt;hr/&gt;"
4748 for HTML and "&lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;&lt;fo:leader
4749 leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;&lt;/fo:block&gt;"
4750 for FO/PDF output (did not try to implement this in dblatex, as we had
4751 switched at this time).  The HTML XSL file looked like this:</p>
4752
4753 <p><blockquote><pre>
4754 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
4755 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
4756   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
4757     &lt;hr/&gt;
4758   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
4759 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
4760 </pre></blockquote></p>
4761
4762 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
4763
4764 <p><blockquote><pre>
4765 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
4766 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
4767   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
4768     &lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;
4769       &lt;fo:leader leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;
4770     &lt;/fo:block&gt;
4771   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
4772 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
4773 </pre></blockquote></p>
4774
4775 <p>Finally, I came across the &lt;bridgehead&gt; tag, which seem to be
4776 a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced &lt;?newscene?&gt;
4777 with &lt;bridgehead&gt;*&lt;/bridgehead&gt;.  It isn't centred, but we
4778 can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn't
4779 enough.</p>
4780
4781 <p>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
4782 linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
4783 directive &lt;?linebreak?&gt;, mapping to &lt;br/&gt; in HTML, and
4784 &lt;fo:block/&gt; in FO/PDF.  I suspect there are better ways to do
4785 this, and welcome ideas and patches on github.  The HTML XSL file now
4786 look like this:</p>
4787
4788 <p><blockquote><pre>
4789 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
4790 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
4791   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
4792     &lt;br/&gt;
4793   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
4794 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
4795 </pre></blockquote></p>
4796
4797 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
4798
4799 <p><blockquote><pre>
4800 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
4801 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'
4802   xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"&gt;
4803   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
4804     &lt;fo:block/&gt;
4805   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
4806 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
4807 </pre></blockquote></p>
4808
4809 <p>One unsolved challenge is our wish to expose different ISBN numbers
4810 per publication format, while keeping all of them in some conditional
4811 structure in the DocBook source.  No idea how to do this, so we ended
4812 up listing all the ISBN numbers next to their format in the colophon
4813 page.</p>
4814
4815 <p>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
4816 <a href="https://github.com/sickel/kodemus">source repository at
4817 github</a>
4818 (<a href="https://github.com/EFN/kodemus">future/new/official
4819 repository</a>).  We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
4820 days.</p>
4821
4822       </div>
4823       <div class="tags">
4824
4825
4826         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
4827
4828
4829       </div>
4830     </div>
4831     <div class="padding"></div>
4832
4833     <div class="entry">
4834       <div class="title">
4835         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux_6_got_a_video_review_from_Pcwizz.html">Skolelinux 6 got a video review from Pcwizz</a>
4836       </div>
4837       <div class="date">
4838         17th March 2013
4839       </div>
4840       <div class="body">
4841         <p>Via
4842 <a href="https://twitter.com/pcwizz/status/313044373262716930">twitter</a>
4843 I just discovered that <a href="http://pcwizz.net/">Pcwizz</a> have
4844 done a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPzTZ61Pcuc">video
4845 review</a> on Youtube of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
4846 / Debian Edu</a> version 6.  He installed the standalone profile and
4847 the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of
4848 a few programs and his view of our distribution.</p>
4849
4850 <p>There is also some really nice quotes (transcribed by me, might
4851 have heard wrong).  While looking thought the Graphics menu:</p>
4852
4853 <blockquote>
4854 "Basically everything you ever need in a school environment."
4855 </blockquote>
4856
4857 <p>And as a general evaluation of the entire distribution:</p>
4858
4859 <blockquote>
4860 "So, yeah, a bit bloated.  It kept all the Debian stuff in there, just
4861 to keep it nice and GNU.  So, I do not want to go on about it, but
4862 lets give it 7 out of 10.  I am not going to use it.  That is because
4863 I am not deploying a school network.  There may be some mythical
4864 feature to help you deploy Skolelinux on a school network."
4865 </blockquote>
4866
4867 <p>To bad he did not test the server profile, and discovered the PXE
4868 installation option.  It make it possible to install only the main
4869 server from CD, and the rest of the machines via the net, and might be
4870 considered the mythical feature he talk about. :)</p>
4871
4872 <p>While looking through the menus, there is also this funny comment
4873 about the part of the K menu generated from the Debian menu subsystem:
4874
4875 <blockquote>
4876 "[The K menu] have a special Debian section for software that no-one
4877 is going to look at, because it contain lots of junky stuff that you
4878 actually don't need in the education distribution, but have just been
4879 included because it isn't stripped out for some reason."
4880 </blockquote>
4881
4882 <p>I guess it is yet another argument for merging the Debian menu and
4883 Gnome/KDE desktop menu entries into
4884 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/DebianMenuUsingDesktopEntries">one
4885 consistent menu system</a> instead of two incomplete and partly
4886 inconsistent menu systems.</p>
4887
4888 <p>The entire video is available below for those accepting iframe
4889 embedding:</p>
4890
4891 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wPzTZ61Pcuc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
4892
4893       </div>
4894       <div class="tags">
4895
4896
4897         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
4898
4899
4900       </div>
4901     </div>
4902     <div class="padding"></div>
4903
4904     <div class="entry">
4905       <div class="title">
4906         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html">First Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze update released</a>
4907       </div>
4908       <div class="date">
4909          8th March 2013
4910       </div>
4911       <div class="body">
4912         <p>Last Sunday, 2013-03-03,, Holger Levsen announced the first update
4913 of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
4914 based on Debian Squeeze.  This is the first update since
4915 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
4916 initial release 2012-03-11</a>.  This is the
4917 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2013/03/msg00000.html">release
4918 announcement email from Holger</a>:</p>
4919
4920 <blockquote><p>Hi,</p>
4921
4922 <p>it's my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Debian
4923 Edu 6.0.7+r1 ("Debian Edu Squeeze").</p>
4924
4925 <p>Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 is an incremental update to Debian Edu
4926 6.0.4+r0, containing all the changes between Debian 6.0.4 and 6.0.7 as
4927 well Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements. See below (in this
4928 mail) for the full list of (edu) changes.  Please see
4929 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311">http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311</a>
4930 for more information on "Debian Edu Squeeze".</p>
4931
4932 <p>Images are available for download at
4933 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/</a></p>
4934
4935 <p>md5sums:
4936 <br>1fe79eb4f0f9ae1c58fc318e26cc1e2e  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
4937 <br>a6ddd924a8bd9a1b5ca122e8fe1c34ec  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
4938 <br>ac6c72cd7925ccec51bfbf58e2a7c69c  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
4939
4940 <p>sha1sums:
4941 <br>a4b58233b672a99c7df8dc24fb6de3327654a5c3  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
4942 <br>9b524915e0ff2aa793f13d93123e5bd2bab2dbaa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
4943 <br>43997614893fc5e9e59ad6ce066b05d07fd836fa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
4944
4945 <p>These images are suitable for amd64+i386.</p>
4946
4947 <p>Changes for Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 Codename "Squeeze", released
4948 2013-03-03:</p>
4949
4950 <ul>
4951   <li>sitesummary was updated from 0.1.3 to 0.1.8
4952   <ul>
4953         <li>Make Nagios configuration more robust and efficient</li>
4954         <li>Comply with 3.X kernel</li>
4955   </ul></li>
4956   <li>debian-edu-doc from 1.4~20120310~6.0.4+r0 to 1.4~20130228~6.0.7+r1
4957   <ul>
4958         <li>Minor updates from the wiki</li>
4959         <li>Danish translation now complete</li>
4960   </ul></li>
4961   <li>debian-edu-config from 1.453 to 1.455
4962      <ul>
4963         <li>Fix /etc/hosts for LTSP diskless workstations. Closes: #699880</li>
4964         <li>Make ltsp_local_mount script work for multiple devices.</li>
4965         <li>Correct Kerberos user policy: don't expire password after 2 days.
4966                 Closes: #664596</li>
4967         <li>Handle '#' characters in the root or first users password.
4968                 Closes: #664976</li>
4969         <li>Fixes for gosa-sync:
4970            <ul>
4971                 <li>Don't fail if password contains "</li>
4972                 <li>Don't disclose new password string in syslog</li>
4973            </ul></li>
4974         <li>Fixes for gosa-create:
4975            <ul>
4976                 <li>Invalidate libnss cache before applying changes</li>
4977                 <li>Multiple failures during mass user import into GOsa²</li>
4978                 <li>gosa-netgroups plugin: don't erase entries of attribute type
4979                          "memberNisNetgroup". Closes: #687256</li>
4980                 <li>First user now uses the same Kerberos policy as all other users</li>
4981            </ul></li>
4982         <li>Add Danish web page</li>
4983     </ul>
4984   <li>debian-edu-install from 1.528 to 1.530
4985     <ul>
4986         <li>Improve preseeding support and documentation</li>
4987     </ul></li>
4988 </ul>
4989
4990 <p>End-user documentation in English is available at
4991 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/</a>
4992 - translations to French, Italian, Danish and German are available in
4993 the debian-edu-doc package. (Other languages could use your help!)</p>
4994
4995 <p>If you want to contribute to Debian Edu, please join our
4996 mailinglist
4997 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@lists.debian.org</a>!
4998 </p></blockquote>
4999
5000 <p>I am very happy to see the fruits of a year of hard work. :)</p>
5001
5002       </div>
5003       <div class="tags">
5004
5005
5006         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5007
5008
5009       </div>
5010     </div>
5011     <div class="padding"></div>
5012
5013     <div class="entry">
5014       <div class="title">
5015         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen___Complete_TV_station_organised_using_the_web.html">Frikanalen - Complete TV station organised using the web</a>
5016       </div>
5017       <div class="date">
5018          3rd March 2013
5019       </div>
5020       <div class="body">
5021         <p>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
5022 broadcast them on the air?  Using free software?  With video on demand
5023 support using
5024 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
5025 open standards</a>?  Included a web based video stream as well?  And
5026 administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world?  A
5027 few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
5028 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> have been building a
5029 system to do just this.  The source code for the solution is licensed
5030 using the GNU LGPL, and
5031 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from github</a>.</p>
5032
5033 <p>The idea is simple.  You upload a video file over the web, and
5034 attach meta information to the file.  You select a time slot in the
5035 program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
5036 in the web stream.  It is also made available in a video on demand
5037 solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time.  All
5038 you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.</p>
5039
5040 <p>There are several parts to this web based solution.  I'll mention
5041 the three most important ones.  The first part is the database of
5042 videos and the schedule.  This is written in Django and include a REST
5043 API.  The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
5044 PostgreSQL.  At the moment this system can be tested on
5045 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/">beta.frikanalen.tv</a>.  The
5046 second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
5047 the database and providing a video stream to broadcast.  This is done
5048 using <a href="http://www.casparcg.com/">CasparCG from SVT</a> and
5049 <a href="http://www.mltframework.org/">Media Lovin' Toolkit</a>.  Video
5050 signal distribution is handled using
5051 <a href="http://www.ob-encoder.com/">Open Broadcast Encoder</a>.  The
5052 third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
5053 video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
5054 on demand.  It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
5055 decided what it will end up using.  Note that the source of the latter
5056 two parts are not yet pushed to github.  The lead author want to clean
5057 them up a bit more first.</p>
5058
5059 <p>The development is coordinated on the
5060 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23frikanalen">#frikanalen IRC
5061 channel</a> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
5062 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen">the
5063 frikanalen mailing list</a>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
5064 (phed on IRC).  Anyone is welcome to participate in the
5065 development.</p>
5066
5067       </div>
5068       <div class="tags">
5069
5070
5071         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
5072
5073
5074       </div>
5075     </div>
5076     <div class="padding"></div>
5077
5078     <div class="entry">
5079       <div class="title">
5080         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dr__Richard_Stallman__founder_of_Free_Software_Foundation__give_a_talk_in_Oslo_March_1st_2013.html">Dr. Richard Stallman, founder of Free Software Foundation, give a talk in Oslo March 1st 2013</a>
5081       </div>
5082       <div class="date">
5083         27th February 2013
5084       </div>
5085       <div class="body">
5086         <p>Dr. <a href="http://www.stallman.org/">Richard Stallman</a>,
5087 founder of <a href="http://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a>,
5088 is giving <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">a
5089 talk in Oslo March 1st 2013 17:00 to 19:00</a>.  The event is public
5090 and organised by <a href="">Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG)</a>
5091 (where I am the chair of the board) and
5092 <a href="http://www.friprog.no/">The Norwegian Open Source Competence
5093 Center</a>.  The title of the talk is «The Free Software Movement and
5094 GNU», with this description:
5095
5096 <p><blockquote>
5097 The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users' freedom to
5098 cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement
5099 developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the
5100 kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.
5101 </blockquote></p>
5102
5103 <p>The meeting is open for everyone.  Due to space limitations, the
5104 doors opens for NUUG members at 16:15, and everyone else at 16:45.  I
5105 am really curious how many will show up.  See
5106 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">the event
5107 page</a> for the location details.</p>
5108
5109       </div>
5110       <div class="tags">
5111
5112
5113         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
5114
5115
5116       </div>
5117     </div>
5118     <div class="padding"></div>
5119
5120     <div class="entry">
5121       <div class="title">
5122         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikart___Free_Garmin_maps_for_European_countries_based_on_OpenStreetmap.html">Frikart - Free Garmin maps for European countries based on OpenStreetmap</a>
5123       </div>
5124       <div class="date">
5125         15th February 2013
5126       </div>
5127       <div class="body">
5128         <p>If you, like me, want an updated a map for your Garmin GPS, there is
5129 now a great source of free maps available from
5130 <a href="http://www.frikart.no/garmin/index.html">Frikart</a>.  To
5131 download a map, just click on the country you are interested in, and
5132 download the map type you want.  There are 8 different maps available,
5133 using different colours and data selection.  Pick one of Roadmap, Topo
5134 Summer, Topo Winter, Roadmap II, Topo Summer II, Topo Winter II,
5135 "Trails - overlay map" and "Cross country - overlay map" (see the web
5136 page for descriptions).</p>
5137
5138 <p>The maps are updated weekly, so if you find something wrong in the
5139 map you can just edit the
5140 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> map source
5141 (anyone can contribute) and fetch a fixed map a week later. :)</p>
5142
5143       </div>
5144       <div class="tags">
5145
5146
5147         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>.
5148
5149
5150       </div>
5151     </div>
5152     <div class="padding"></div>
5153
5154     <div class="entry">
5155       <div class="title">
5156         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html">"Electronic" paper invoices - using vCard in a QR code</a>
5157       </div>
5158       <div class="date">
5159         12th February 2013
5160       </div>
5161       <div class="body">
5162         <p>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
5163 <a href="http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura">solution promoted
5164 by the Norwegian government</a> require that invoices are sent through
5165 one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
5166 electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
5167 facilitators.  This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
5168 transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers.  My preferred
5169 solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
5170 between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
5171 protocol like REST or SOAP.  But this might also be overkill, as the
5172 "electronic" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
5173 using a simple bar code.  My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
5174 codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there.  The
5175 content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
5176 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard">the vCard format</a>, as
5177 it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.</p>
5178
5179 <p>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
5180 information can be included using such extentions.  For example an
5181 invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
5182 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">ask
5183 for donations to the Debian Edu project</a> and thus have bank account
5184 information publicly available) for NOK 1000.00 could have these extra
5185 fields:</p>
5186
5187 <p><pre>
5188 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
5189 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
5190 X-INVOICE-KID:123412341234
5191 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
5192 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
5193 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
5194 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
5195 </pre></p>
5196
5197 <p>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
5198 answer regarding
5199 <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file">how
5200 to put bank account information into a vCard</a>.  For payments in
5201 Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
5202 used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.</p>
5203
5204 <p>The complete vCard could look like this:</p>
5205
5206 <p><pre>
5207 BEGIN:VCARD
5208 VERSION:2.1
5209 ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
5210 ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei 29D;OSLO;;0485;Norway
5211 URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
5212 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
5213 REV:20130212T095000Z
5214 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
5215 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
5216 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
5217 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
5218 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
5219 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
5220 END:VCARD
5221 </pre></p>
5222
5223 <p>The resulting QR code created using
5224 <a href="http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/">qrencode</a> would look
5225 like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
5226 phone, or for example the <a href="http://zbar.sourceforge.net/">zbar
5227 bar code reader</a> and feed right into the approval and accounting
5228 system.</p>
5229
5230 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-12-qr-invoice.png"></p>
5231
5232 <p>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
5233 vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
5234 handling invoices.  I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
5235 are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.</p>
5236
5237 <p><strong>Update 2013-02-12 11:30</strong>: Added KID to the proposal
5238 based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.</p>
5239
5240       </div>
5241       <div class="tags">
5242
5243
5244         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
5245
5246
5247       </div>
5248     </div>
5249     <div class="padding"></div>
5250
5251     <div class="entry">
5252       <div class="title">
5253         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sleep_until_morning___home_automation_for_the_kids.html">Sleep until morning - home automation for the kids</a>
5254       </div>
5255       <div class="date">
5256         10th February 2013
5257       </div>
5258       <div class="body">
5259         <p><img align="left" style="margin-right:25px;" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-10-morning-light.jpeg"></p>
5260
5261 <p>With kids in the house, one challenge is getting them to sleep
5262 during the night and wake up when it is morning.  I mean, when I
5263 believe it is morning, and not two hours earlier.  In our household we
5264 have decided that 07:00 is the turning point, but getting the kids to
5265 sleep until 07:00 is a small challenge every day.  They have adapted
5266 quite well, and rarely wake up at 05:00 any more, but some times wake
5267 up at times like 05:50, 06:15, 06:30 or 06:45, and it is hard to put
5268 the awake one to bed again without disturbing and waking the rest.
5269 And I understand perfectly well that they fail to sleep until 07:00
5270 some times, as there is no way for them to know if it is before or
5271 after the magic moment without coming and asking us parents.</p>
5272
5273 <p>But yesterday I came up with a method to solve this problem.  It
5274 involve home automation.  A few years ago I bought a
5275 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick">Tellstick</a> and RF
5276 switches at the local <a href="http://www.clasohlson.com/">Clas
5277 Ohlson</a> shop, allowing me to control lights and other electrical
5278 gadgets using my Linux server.  When I moved from the old flat to a
5279 small house, I put away all this equipment as most of the lighting in
5280 the house was not using wall sockets and thus not easy to connect to
5281 the gadgets I had.  But recently I bought a
5282 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick_net">Tellstick
5283 Net</a> to be able to read sensor input as well as control power
5284 sockets.  I want to control ovens in the basement to avoid the pipes
5285 to freeze, and monitor the humidity to detect flooding.  The default
5286 setup for Tellstick Net is to be controlled by the vendor web service,
5287 which to me is a security problem, but it is also possible to build
5288 ones own
5289 <a href="http://developer.telldus.com/blog/2012/03/02/help-us-develop-local-access-using-tellstick-net-build-your-own-firmware">firmware
5290 with local access</A> instead of being controlled by a Swedish
5291 company, thanks to the release of the GPL licensed firmware source
5292 code.  I plan to get that running before I let it control anything
5293 important.  But while working on this, one idea to make it easier for
5294 the kids came to me yesterday.  We can set up a night light controlled
5295 by the computer, and turn it automatically on at 07:00.  The kids can
5296 then check the light in the morning to know if they are supposed to
5297 get up or not.  They joined me in setting everything up, and I
5298 repeated the concept several times before bed times to make sure they
5299 remembered to check the light before getting up in the morning.</p>
5300
5301 <p>We tested it this morning, and all the kids stayed in bed until
5302 after 07:00, and every one of them commented on the fact that the
5303 "morning light" was turned on and signalled that the morning had
5304 arrived.  So this look like a success, and I am excited to see how
5305 this develops the next few days. :) I really hope this can allow us
5306 all to sleep a bit longer in the morning.</p>
5307
5308 <p>A nice advantage of this setup is that we can remote control when
5309 to tell the kids to get up.  We do not have to wait until 07:00, and
5310 can also delay it if we want to.</p>
5311
5312       </div>
5313       <div class="tags">
5314
5315
5316         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5317
5318
5319       </div>
5320     </div>
5321     <div class="padding"></div>
5322
5323     <div class="entry">
5324       <div class="title">
5325         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html">Bitcoin GUI now available from Debian/unstable (and Ubuntu/raring)</a>
5326       </div>
5327       <div class="date">
5328          2nd February 2013
5329       </div>
5330       <div class="body">
5331         <p>My
5332 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
5333 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
5334 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
5335 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
5336 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
5337 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
5338 version too.</p>
5339
5340 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
5341 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
5342 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
5343 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
5344 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
5345 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
5346 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
5347 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
5348
5349 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
5350 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
5351 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
5352 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
5353 it. :)</p>
5354
5355 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5356 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5357 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5358
5359       </div>
5360       <div class="tags">
5361
5362
5363         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5364
5365
5366       </div>
5367     </div>
5368     <div class="padding"></div>
5369
5370     <div class="entry">
5371       <div class="title">
5372         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
5373       </div>
5374       <div class="date">
5375         22nd January 2013
5376       </div>
5377       <div class="body">
5378         <p>Yesterday, I
5379 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
5380 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
5381 pluggable hardware devices, which I
5382 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
5383 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
5384 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
5385 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
5386 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
5387 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
5388 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
5389 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
5390 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
5391 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
5392
5393 <pre>
5394 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
5395 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
5396 </pre>
5397
5398 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
5399 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
5400 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
5401 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
5402
5403 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
5404 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
5405 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
5406 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
5407 word.</p>
5408
5409 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
5410 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
5411 process.</p>
5412
5413 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
5414 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
5415
5416       </div>
5417       <div class="tags">
5418
5419
5420         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
5421
5422
5423       </div>
5424     </div>
5425     <div class="padding"></div>
5426
5427     <div class="entry">
5428       <div class="title">
5429         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">First prototype ready making hardware easier to use in Debian</a>
5430       </div>
5431       <div class="date">
5432         21st January 2013
5433       </div>
5434       <div class="body">
5435         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
5436 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
5437 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
5438 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
5439 it, fetch the
5440 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
5441 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
5442 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
5443 autostart script.</p>
5444
5445 <p>The design is simple:</p>
5446
5447 <ul>
5448
5449 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
5450 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
5451
5452 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
5453 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
5454 initially did.</li>
5455
5456 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
5457 the APT database, a database
5458 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
5459 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
5460
5461 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
5462 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
5463 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
5464 package or packages.</li>
5465
5466 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
5467 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
5468
5469 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
5470 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
5471
5472 </ul>
5473
5474 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
5475 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
5476 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
5477 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
5478
5479 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
5480 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
5481 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
5482 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
5483 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
5484
5485 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
5486 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
5487 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
5488 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
5489 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
5490 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
5491 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
5492 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
5493
5494 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
5495 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
5496 '<tt>svn checkout
5497 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
5498 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
5499 devscripts package.</p>
5500
5501 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
5502 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
5503 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
5504 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
5505 instructions</a> for details.</p>
5506
5507       </div>
5508       <div class="tags">
5509
5510
5511         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
5512
5513
5514       </div>
5515     </div>
5516     <div class="padding"></div>
5517
5518     <div class="entry">
5519       <div class="title">
5520         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">Thank you Thinkpad X41, for your long and trustworthy service</a>
5521       </div>
5522       <div class="date">
5523         19th January 2013
5524       </div>
5525       <div class="body">
5526         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
5527 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
5528 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
5529 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
5530 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
5531 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
5532 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
5533 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
5534 not a durable solution.
5535
5536 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
5537 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
5538
5539 <ul>
5540
5541 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
5542   than A4).</li>
5543 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
5544 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
5545 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
5546 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
5547 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
5548 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
5549 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
5550 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
5551 size).</li>
5552 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
5553   X.org packages.</li>
5554 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
5555   the time).
5556
5557 </ul>
5558
5559 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
5560 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
5561 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
5562 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
5563 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
5564 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
5565 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
5566 still be useful.</p>
5567
5568 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
5569 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
5570 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
5571 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
5572 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
5573 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
5574
5575       </div>
5576       <div class="tags">
5577
5578
5579         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5580
5581
5582       </div>
5583     </div>
5584     <div class="padding"></div>
5585
5586     <div class="entry">
5587       <div class="title">
5588         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html">How to find a browser plugin supporting a given MIME type</a>
5589       </div>
5590       <div class="date">
5591         18th January 2013
5592       </div>
5593       <div class="body">
5594         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
5595 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
5596 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
5597 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
5598 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
5599 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
5600 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
5601
5602 <pre>
5603 #!/usr/bin/python
5604 import sys
5605 import apt
5606 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
5607     cache = apt.Cache()
5608     cache.open(None)
5609     thepkgs = []
5610     for pkg in cache:
5611         version = pkg.candidate
5612         if version is None:
5613             version = pkg.installed
5614         if version is None:
5615             continue
5616         record = version.record
5617         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
5618             continue
5619         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
5620         for t in mime_types:
5621             t = t.rstrip().strip()
5622             if t == mimetype:
5623                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
5624     return thepkgs
5625 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
5626 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
5627     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
5628 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
5629 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
5630     print "  %s" %pkg
5631 </pre>
5632
5633 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
5634
5635 <pre>
5636 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
5637 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
5638   gecko-mediaplayer
5639 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
5640 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
5641   browser-plugin-gnash
5642 %
5643 </pre>
5644
5645 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
5646 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
5647 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
5648 anyone working on adding it?</p>
5649
5650 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
5651 request for icweasel support for this feature is
5652 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
5653 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
5654 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
5655 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
5656
5657       </div>
5658       <div class="tags">
5659
5660
5661         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5662
5663
5664       </div>
5665     </div>
5666     <div class="padding"></div>
5667
5668     <div class="entry">
5669       <div class="title">
5670         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian?</a>
5671       </div>
5672       <div class="date">
5673         16th January 2013
5674       </div>
5675       <div class="body">
5676         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
5677 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
5678 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
5679 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
5680 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
5681 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
5682 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
5683 downloaded by the browser.</p>
5684
5685 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
5686 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
5687 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
5688 can be found on the
5689 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
5690 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
5691 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
5692 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
5693 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
5694
5695 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
5696
5697 <pre>
5698   count MIME type
5699   ----- -----------------------
5700      32 text/plain
5701      30 audio/mpeg
5702      29 image/png
5703      28 image/jpeg
5704      27 application/ogg
5705      26 audio/x-mp3
5706      25 image/tiff
5707      25 image/gif
5708      22 image/bmp
5709      22 audio/x-wav
5710      20 audio/x-flac
5711      19 audio/x-mpegurl
5712      18 video/x-ms-asf
5713      18 audio/x-musepack
5714      18 audio/x-mpeg
5715      18 application/x-ogg
5716      17 video/mpeg
5717      17 audio/x-scpls
5718      17 audio/ogg
5719      16 video/x-ms-wmv
5720 </pre>
5721
5722 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
5723
5724 <pre>
5725   count MIME type
5726   ----- -----------------------
5727      33 text/plain
5728      32 image/png
5729      32 image/jpeg
5730      29 audio/mpeg
5731      27 image/gif
5732      26 image/tiff
5733      26 application/ogg
5734      25 audio/x-mp3
5735      22 image/bmp
5736      21 audio/x-wav
5737      19 audio/x-mpegurl
5738      19 audio/x-mpeg
5739      18 video/mpeg
5740      18 audio/x-scpls
5741      18 audio/x-flac
5742      18 application/x-ogg
5743      17 video/x-ms-asf
5744      17 text/html
5745      17 audio/x-musepack
5746      16 image/x-xbitmap
5747 </pre>
5748
5749 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
5750
5751 <pre>
5752   count MIME type
5753   ----- -----------------------
5754      31 text/plain
5755      31 image/png
5756      31 image/jpeg
5757      29 audio/mpeg
5758      28 application/ogg
5759      27 image/gif
5760      26 image/tiff
5761      26 audio/x-mp3
5762      23 audio/x-wav
5763      22 image/bmp
5764      21 audio/x-flac
5765      20 audio/x-mpegurl
5766      19 audio/x-mpeg
5767      18 video/x-ms-asf
5768      18 video/mpeg
5769      18 audio/x-scpls
5770      18 application/x-ogg
5771      17 audio/x-musepack
5772      16 video/x-ms-wmv
5773      16 video/x-msvideo
5774 </pre>
5775
5776 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
5777 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
5778 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
5779 issues.</p>
5780
5781 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
5782 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
5783
5784       </div>
5785       <div class="tags">
5786
5787
5788         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5789
5790
5791       </div>
5792     </div>
5793     <div class="padding"></div>
5794
5795     <div class="entry">
5796       <div class="title">
5797         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html">Using modalias info to find packages handling my hardware</a>
5798       </div>
5799       <div class="date">
5800         15th January 2013
5801       </div>
5802       <div class="body">
5803         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
5804 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
5805 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
5806 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
5807 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
5808 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
5809 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
5810 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
5811 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
5812 packages.</p>
5813
5814 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
5815 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
5816 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
5817 modalias.</p>
5818
5819 <p><blockquote>
5820 Package: package-name
5821 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
5822 </blockquote></p>
5823
5824 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
5825 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
5826
5827 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
5828 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
5829
5830 <p><blockquote>
5831 Package: cheese
5832 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
5833 </blockquote></p>
5834
5835 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
5836 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
5837
5838 <p><blockquote>
5839 Package: pcmciautils
5840 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
5841 </blockquote></p>
5842
5843 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
5844 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
5845
5846 <p><blockquote>
5847 Package: colorhug-client
5848 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
5849 </blockquote></p>
5850
5851 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
5852 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
5853 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
5854
5855 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
5856 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
5857 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
5858 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
5859 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
5860 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
5861 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
5862 Raring.</p>
5863
5864 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
5865 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
5866 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
5867 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
5868 try the
5869 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
5870 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
5871 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
5872 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
5873
5874 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
5875 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
5876
5877 <p><blockquote>
5878 % ./hw-support-lookup
5879 <br>yubikey-personalization
5880 <br>%
5881 </blockquote></p>
5882
5883 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
5884 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
5885
5886 <p><blockquote>
5887 % ./hw-support-lookup
5888 <br>pcmciautils
5889 <br>%
5890 </blockquote></p>
5891
5892 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
5893 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
5894 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
5895
5896 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
5897 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
5898 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
5899 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
5900 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
5901 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
5902 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
5903 see if it work.</p>
5904
5905 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
5906 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
5907 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
5908 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
5909
5910       </div>
5911       <div class="tags">
5912
5913
5914         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
5915
5916
5917       </div>
5918     </div>
5919     <div class="padding"></div>
5920
5921     <div class="entry">
5922       <div class="title">
5923         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">Modalias strings - a practical way to map "stuff" to hardware</a>
5924       </div>
5925       <div class="date">
5926         14th January 2013
5927       </div>
5928       <div class="body">
5929         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
5930 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
5931 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
5932 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
5933 in
5934 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
5935 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
5936
5937 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
5938
5939 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
5940 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
5941 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
5942 &lt;URL: <a href="http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26132/how-to-assign-usb-driver-to-device">http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26132/how-to-assign-usb-driver-to-device</a> &gt;,
5943 &lt;URL: <a href="http://code.metager.de/source/history/linux/stable/scripts/mod/file2alias.c">http://code.metager.de/source/history/linux/stable/scripts/mod/file2alias.c</a> &gt; and
5944 &lt;URL: <a href="http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/dmidecode/dmidecode.c?root=dmidecode&view=markup">http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/dmidecode/dmidecode.c?root=dmidecode&view=markup</a> &gt;.
5945
5946 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
5947 this shell script:</p>
5948
5949 <pre>
5950 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
5951 </pre>
5952
5953 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
5954 using modinfo:</p>
5955
5956 <pre>
5957 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
5958 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
5959 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
5960 %
5961 </pre>
5962
5963 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
5964
5965 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
5966 Bridge memory controller:</p>
5967
5968 <p><blockquote>
5969 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
5970 </blockquote></p>
5971
5972 <p>This represent these values:</p>
5973
5974 <pre>
5975  v   00008086  (vendor)
5976  d   00002770  (device)
5977  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
5978  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
5979  bc  06        (bus class)
5980  sc  00        (bus subclass)
5981  i   00        (interface)
5982 </pre>
5983
5984 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
5985 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
5986 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
5987 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
5988
5989 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
5990 means.</p>
5991
5992 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
5993
5994 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
5995 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
5996
5997 <p><blockquote>
5998 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
5999 </blockquote></p>
6000
6001 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
6002
6003 <pre>
6004  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
6005  p    0001  (device product)
6006  d    0206  (bcddevice)
6007  dc     09  (device class)
6008  dsc    00  (device subclass)
6009  dp     00  (device protocol)
6010  ic     09  (interface class)
6011  isc    00  (interface subclass)
6012  ip     00  (interface protocol)
6013 </pre>
6014
6015 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
6016 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
6017 these alias entries show up:</p>
6018
6019 <p><blockquote>
6020 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
6021 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
6022 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
6023 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
6024 </blockquote></p>
6025
6026 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
6027 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
6028 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
6029
6030 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
6031
6032 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
6033 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
6034
6035 <p><blockquote>
6036 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
6037 </blockquote></p>
6038
6039 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
6040
6041 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
6042
6043 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
6044 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
6045 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
6046
6047 <p><blockquote>
6048 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
6049 </blockquote></p>
6050
6051 <p>The values present are</p>
6052
6053 <pre>
6054  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
6055  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
6056  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
6057  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
6058  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
6059  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
6060  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
6061  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
6062  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
6063  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
6064  ct   10             (chassis type)
6065  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
6066 </pre>
6067
6068 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
6069 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
6070
6071 <pre>
6072   3 Desktop
6073   4 Low Profile Desktop
6074   5 Pizza Box
6075   6 Mini Tower
6076   7 Tower
6077   8 Portable
6078   9 Laptop
6079  10 Notebook
6080  11 Hand Held
6081  12 Docking Station
6082  13 All In One
6083  14 Sub Notebook
6084  15 Space-saving
6085  16 Lunch Box
6086  17 Main Server Chassis
6087  18 Expansion Chassis
6088  19 Sub Chassis
6089  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
6090  21 Peripheral Chassis
6091  22 RAID Chassis
6092  23 Rack Mount Chassis
6093  24 Sealed-case PC
6094  25 Multi-system
6095  26 CompactPCI
6096  27 AdvancedTCA
6097  28 Blade
6098  29 Blade Enclosing
6099 </pre>
6100
6101 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
6102 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
6103 claim it is a desktop.</p>
6104
6105 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
6106
6107 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
6108 test machine:</p>
6109
6110 <p><blockquote>
6111 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
6112 </blockquote></p>
6113
6114 <p>The values present are</p>
6115
6116 <pre>
6117   ty  01  (type)
6118   pr  00  (prototype)
6119   id  00  (id)
6120   ex  00  (extra)
6121 </pre>
6122
6123 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
6124 the valid values are.</p>
6125
6126 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
6127
6128 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
6129 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
6130 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
6131 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
6132 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
6133 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
6134 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
6135
6136 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
6137
6138 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
6139 one can use the following shell script:</p>
6140
6141 <pre>
6142   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
6143     echo "$id" ; \
6144     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
6145   done
6146 </pre>
6147
6148 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
6149 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
6150
6151 <pre>
6152   acpi:ACPI0003:
6153     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
6154   acpi:device:
6155   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
6156   acpi:IBM0068:
6157     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
6158     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
6159     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
6160     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
6161   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
6162     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
6163     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
6164     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
6165   [...]
6166 </pre>
6167
6168 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
6169 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
6170 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
6171 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
6172
6173 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
6174 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
6175 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
6176
6177       </div>
6178       <div class="tags">
6179
6180
6181         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
6182
6183
6184       </div>
6185     </div>
6186     <div class="padding"></div>
6187
6188     <div class="entry">
6189       <div class="title">
6190         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html">Moved the pymissile Debian packaging to collab-maint</a>
6191       </div>
6192       <div class="date">
6193         10th January 2013
6194       </div>
6195       <div class="body">
6196         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
6197 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
6198 Launcher and updated the Debian package
6199 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
6200 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
6201 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
6202 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
6203 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
6204 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
6205 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
6206 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
6207 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
6208 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
6209 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
6210 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
6211 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
6212 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
6213 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
6214
6215       </div>
6216       <div class="tags">
6217
6218
6219         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
6220
6221
6222       </div>
6223     </div>
6224     <div class="padding"></div>
6225
6226     <div class="entry">
6227       <div class="title">
6228         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">Lets make hardware dongles easier to use in Debian</a>
6229       </div>
6230       <div class="date">
6231          9th January 2013
6232       </div>
6233       <div class="body">
6234         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
6235 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
6236 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
6237 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
6238 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
6239 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
6240 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
6241 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
6242 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
6243 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
6244 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
6245
6246 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
6247 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
6248 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
6249 simple:
6250
6251 <ul>
6252
6253 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
6254   starting when a user log in.</li>
6255
6256 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
6257   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
6258
6259 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
6260   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
6261   packages.</li>
6262
6263 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
6264   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
6265
6266 </ul>
6267
6268 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
6269 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
6270 discover database to find packages and
6271 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
6272 packages.</p>
6273
6274 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
6275 draft package is now checked into
6276 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
6277 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
6278 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
6279 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
6280 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
6281 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
6282 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
6283 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
6284 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
6285 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
6286 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
6287 because of the freeze).</p>
6288
6289 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
6290 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
6291 inserted):</p>
6292
6293 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
6294
6295 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
6296 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
6297 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
6298
6299 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
6300 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
6301 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
6302 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
6303 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
6304 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
6305 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
6306
6307 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
6308 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
6309 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
6310 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
6311 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
6312 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
6313 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
6314 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
6315 not be installed?</p>
6316
6317 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
6318 please send me an email. :)</p>
6319
6320       </div>
6321       <div class="tags">
6322
6323
6324         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
6325
6326
6327       </div>
6328     </div>
6329     <div class="padding"></div>
6330
6331     <div class="entry">
6332       <div class="title">
6333         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">New IRC channel for LEGO designers using Debian</a>
6334       </div>
6335       <div class="date">
6336          2nd January 2013
6337       </div>
6338       <div class="body">
6339         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
6340 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
6341 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
6342 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
6343 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
6344 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
6345 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
6346 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
6347 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
6348 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
6349
6350 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
6351 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
6352 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
6353
6354       </div>
6355       <div class="tags">
6356
6357
6358         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
6359
6360
6361       </div>
6362     </div>
6363     <div class="padding"></div>
6364
6365     <div class="entry">
6366       <div class="title">
6367         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html">A Christmas present for Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
6368       </div>
6369       <div class="date">
6370         28th December 2012
6371       </div>
6372       <div class="body">
6373         <p>I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
6374 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
6375 project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
6376 Agency in Trondheim.  NOK 1000,- showed up on our donation account
6377 December 24th.  I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
6378 present.  As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
6379 funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
6380 gatherings, this donation was most welcome.  One developer gathering
6381 cost around NOK 15&nbsp;000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
6382 development pace we want.  Thus, I hope their example this year is
6383 followed by many others. :)</p>
6384
6385 <p>The public list of donors can be found on
6386 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">the
6387 donation page</a> for the project, which also contain instructions if
6388 you want to donate to the project.</p>
6389
6390       </div>
6391       <div class="tags">
6392
6393
6394         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6395
6396
6397       </div>
6398     </div>
6399     <div class="padding"></div>
6400
6401     <div class="entry">
6402       <div class="title">
6403         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">How to backport bitcoin-qt version 0.7.2-2 to Debian Squeeze</a>
6404       </div>
6405       <div class="date">
6406         25th December 2012
6407       </div>
6408       <div class="body">
6409         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
6410 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
6411
6412 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
6413 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
6414 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
6415 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
6416 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
6417 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
6418 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
6419 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
6420 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
6421 name.</p>
6422
6423 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
6424 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
6425 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
6426
6427 <blockquote><pre>
6428 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
6429 cd bitcoin
6430 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
6431 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
6432 </pre></blockquote>
6433
6434 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
6435 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
6436 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
6437 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
6438 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
6439 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
6440 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
6441 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
6442 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
6443
6444 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6445 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6446 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6447
6448       </div>
6449       <div class="tags">
6450
6451
6452         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6453
6454
6455       </div>
6456     </div>
6457     <div class="padding"></div>
6458
6459     <div class="entry">
6460       <div class="title">
6461         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
6462       </div>
6463       <div class="date">
6464         21st December 2012
6465       </div>
6466       <div class="body">
6467         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
6468 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
6469 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
6470 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
6471 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
6472 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
6473 is now maintained by a
6474 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
6475 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
6476 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
6477 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
6478 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
6479 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
6480 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
6481 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
6482 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
6483 Corallo in a
6484 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
6485 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
6486 Debian package.</p>
6487
6488 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
6489 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
6490 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
6491 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
6492 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
6493 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
6494 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
6495 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
6496 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
6497 new version to unstable.
6498
6499 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
6500 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
6501 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
6502 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
6503 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
6504 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
6505 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
6506 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
6507 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
6508 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
6509 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
6510 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
6511 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
6512 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
6513 have not tested them.</p>
6514
6515 <p>My
6516 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
6517 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
6518 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
6519 years ago, as can be
6520 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
6521 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
6522 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
6523 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
6524 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
6525 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
6526 the same address as last time,
6527 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6528
6529       </div>
6530       <div class="tags">
6531
6532
6533         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6534
6535
6536       </div>
6537     </div>
6538     <div class="padding"></div>
6539
6540     <div class="entry">
6541       <div class="title">
6542         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ledger___double_entry_accounting_using_text_based_storage_format.html">Ledger - double-entry accounting using text based storage format</a>
6543       </div>
6544       <div class="date">
6545         18th December 2012
6546       </div>
6547       <div class="body">
6548         <p>A few days ago I came across
6549 <a href="http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/">a blog post from Joey
6550 Hess</a> describing <a href="http://ledger-cli.org/">ledger</a> and
6551 hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting.  I found it
6552 interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
6553 accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
6554 the different web based systems we use.  I find it hard to find what I
6555 look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
6556 the systems.  Ledger seem different.  The accounting data is kept in
6557 text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
6558
6559 are at least <a href="https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports">five
6560 different implementations</a> able to read the format.  An example
6561 entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
6562 generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:</p>
6563
6564 <blockquote><pre>
6565 2004-05-27 Book Store
6566       Expenses:Books                 $20.00
6567       Liabilities:Visa
6568 </pre></blockquote>
6569
6570 <p>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
6571 look for others using it.  I found blog posts from
6572 <a href="http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/">Christine
6573 Spang</a>,
6574 <a href="http://bugsplat.info/2010-05-23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html">Pete
6575 Keen</a>,
6576 <a href="http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2010/11/06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/">Andrew
6577 Cantino</a> and
6578 <a href="http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/2012/11/29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/">Ronald
6579 Ip</a> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
6580 <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo">Bradley
6581 M. Kuhn</a> at the Software Freedom Conservancy.  All seemed like good
6582 recommendations fitting my need.</p>
6583
6584 <p>The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html">ledger</a>
6585 package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
6586 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html">hledger</a>
6587 package only is available in Debian Sid.  As I use Squeeze, ledger
6588 seemed the best choice to get started.</p>
6589
6590 <p>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
6591 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger">web scraper</a> for
6592 <a href="http://www.lodo.no/">LODO</a>, the accounting system used by
6593 the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> association, and started to
6594 play with the data set.  I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
6595 am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
6596 using the "<tt>ledger balance</tt>" command.  But I will have to
6597 gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
6598 for the organisations I am involved in.</p>
6599
6600       </div>
6601       <div class="tags">
6602
6603
6604         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
6605
6606
6607       </div>
6608     </div>
6609     <div class="padding"></div>
6610
6611     <div class="entry">
6612       <div class="title">
6613         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Scripting_the_Cerebrum_bofhd_user_administration_system_using_XML_RPC.html">Scripting the Cerebrum/bofhd user administration system using XML-RPC</a>
6614       </div>
6615       <div class="date">
6616          6th December 2012
6617       </div>
6618       <div class="body">
6619         <p>Where I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of
6620 Oslo</a>, we use the
6621 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/">Cerebrum user
6622 administration system</a> to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
6623 I've known since the system was written that the server is providing
6624 an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC">XML-RPC</a> API, but
6625 I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
6626 always use the bofh command line client at work.  Until today.  I want
6627 to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
6628 virtual machines.  Here are a few notes on how to use it with
6629 Python.</p>
6630
6631 <p>I started by looking at the source of the Java
6632 <a href="http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/">bofh
6633 client</a>, to figure out how it connected to the API server.  I also
6634 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
6635 <a href="http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html">a
6636 simple example in</a> the XML-RPC howto.</p>
6637
6638 <p>This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
6639 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
6640 user currently logged in:</p>
6641
6642 <blockquote><pre>
6643 #!/usr/bin/env python
6644 import getpass
6645 import xmlrpclib
6646 server_url = 'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000';
6647 username = getpass.getuser()
6648 password = getpass.getpass()
6649 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
6650 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
6651 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
6652 print server.run_command(sessionid, "user_info", username)
6653 result = server.logout(sessionid)
6654 print result
6655 </pre></blockquote>
6656
6657 <p>Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
6658 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.</p>
6659
6660       </div>
6661       <div class="tags">
6662
6663
6664         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
6665
6666
6667       </div>
6668     </div>
6669     <div class="padding"></div>
6670
6671     <div class="entry">
6672       <div class="title">
6673         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_the_value_of_copyright_taxed_.html">Why isn't the value of copyright taxed?</a>
6674       </div>
6675       <div class="date">
6676         17th November 2012
6677       </div>
6678       <div class="body">
6679         <p>While working on a
6680 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Norwegian
6681 translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a> (76% done),
6682 which cover the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles
6683 creativity, one idea occurred to me.  The idea is to get the tax
6684 office to help make more works enter the public domain and also help
6685 make it easier to clear rights for using copyrighted works.</p>
6686
6687 <p>I mentioned this idea briefly during Yesterdays
6688 <a href="http://www.farmann.no/2012/11/14/john-perry-barlow-in-oslo-friday-nov-16
6689 -15-30-19-00/">presentation
6690 by John Perry Barlow</a>, and concluded that it was best to put it
6691 in writing for a wider audience.  The idea is not really based on the
6692 argument that copyrighted works are "intellectual property", as the
6693 core requirement is that copyrighted work have value for the copyright
6694 holder and the tax office like to collect their share from any value
6695 controlled by the citizens in a country.  I'm sharing the idea here to
6696 let others consider it and perhaps shoot it down with a fresh set of
6697 arguments.</p>
6698
6699 <p>Most valuables are taxed by the government.  At least here in
6700 Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
6701 the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
6702 stocks and other valuables are all added together.  If the tax value
6703 of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
6704 taxes for these values.  And copyrighted work have value.  It have
6705 value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
6706 work.  But it is not included in the tax calculations?  Why not?</p>
6707
6708 <p>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it would want to
6709 maintain a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the
6710 rights holders for a given works, to be able to associate the works
6711 value to the right citizen or company for tax purposes.  If such
6712 database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to
6713 for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very
6714 hard operation with todays copyright law.  To ensure that copyright
6715 holders keep the database up-to-date, it would have to become a
6716 requirement to be able to collect money for granting access to
6717 copyrighted works that the work is listed in the database with the
6718 correct right holder.</p>
6719
6720 <p>If copyright causes copyright holders to have to pay more taxes,
6721 they will have a small incentive to "disown" their copyright, and let
6722 the work enter the public domain. For works with several right holders
6723 one of the right holders could state (and get it registered in the
6724 database) that she do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to
6725 use the work in question and thus will not get any income from that
6726 work.  Stating this would have to be impossible to revert and stop the
6727 tax office from adding the value of that work to the given citizens
6728 tax calculation.  I assume the copyright law would stay the same,
6729 allowing creators to pick a license of their choosing, and also
6730 allowing them to put their work directly in the public domain.  The
6731 existence of such database will make it even easier to clear rights,
6732 and if the right holders listed in the database is taxed, this system
6733 would increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.</p>
6734
6735 <p>The effect would be that the tax office help to make it easier to
6736 get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public
6737 domain and help to get more work into the public domain and .</p>
6738
6739 <p>Why have such taxing not happened yet?  I am sure the tax office
6740 would like to tax copyrighted work values if they could.</p>
6741
6742       </div>
6743       <div class="tags">
6744
6745
6746         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
6747
6748
6749       </div>
6750     </div>
6751     <div class="padding"></div>
6752
6753     <div class="entry">
6754       <div class="title">
6755         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html">Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß</a>
6756       </div>
6757       <div class="date">
6758         14th November 2012
6759       </div>
6760       <div class="body">
6761         <p>Here is another interview with one of the people in the <a
6762 href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
6763 community.  I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
6764 if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
6765 After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
6766 the people behind the German
6767 "<a href="http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/">IT-Zukunft Schule</a>"
6768 project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview.  Give a warm
6769 welcome to Angela Fuß. :)</p>
6770
6771 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
6772
6773 <p>I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
6774 Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
6775 two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
6776
6777 <p>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
6778 the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
6779 Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
6780 growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
6781 system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-).  We are also
6782 in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.</p>
6783
6784 <p>In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
6785 nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there.  Besides
6786 that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
6787 working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North
6788 Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
6789 relationship management and the communication processes in the
6790 project.</p>
6791
6792 <p>Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
6793 and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
6794 and a yoga teacher.</p>
6795
6796 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
6797 project?</strong></p>
6798
6799 <p>I fell in love with Mike ;-).</p>
6800
6801 <p>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
6802 Free Software.  At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
6803 founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
6804 their IT environment.  Often when Mike came home from working at the
6805 newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
6806 several points where the communication with the schools head or the
6807 teachers did not work.  So we were clear that he would not work for
6808 one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
6809 between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
6810 parents.</p>
6811
6812 <p>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
6813 started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
6814 schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
6815 Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
6816 networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
6817 Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
6818 Germany.</p>
6819
6820 <p>For information about our school project you can read
6821 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">the
6822 interview with Mike Gabriel</a>.</p>
6823
6824 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6825 Edu?</strong></p>
6826
6827 <p>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
6828 answer comes rather from a social point of view.</p>
6829
6830 <p>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
6831 and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
6832 background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
6833 and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
6834 something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
6835 ;-). This is of course a user experience.  What I also get as a big
6836 advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
6837 works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
6838 teachers, parents...</p>
6839
6840 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6841 Edu?</strong></p>
6842
6843 <p>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
6844 Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
6845
6846 <p>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
6847 the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
6848 marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
6849 schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
6850 I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
6851
6852 <p>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
6853 do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
6854 democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
6855 and helpful.  I am also missing some kind of contact between the
6856 Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
6857 level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
6858 different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
6859
6860 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
6861
6862 <p>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
6863 on.  As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
6864 LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
6865 my N900 running with Maemo.</p>
6866
6867 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
6868 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
6869
6870 <p>I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
6871 Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
6872 schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
6873 that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
6874 strategy has three crucial pillars:</p>
6875
6876 <ul>
6877
6878 <li>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
6879 concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
6880 kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.</li>
6881
6882 <li>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
6883 are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
6884 beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
6885 they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
6886 they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
6887 needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
6888 we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.</li>
6889
6890 <li>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
6891 co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
6892 contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
6893 offer to become more and more independent from us.</li>
6894
6895 </ul>
6896
6897       </div>
6898       <div class="tags">
6899
6900
6901         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
6902
6903
6904       </div>
6905     </div>
6906     <div class="padding"></div>
6907
6908     <div class="entry">
6909       <div class="title">
6910         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_European_Central_Bank__ECB__take_a_look_at_bitcoin.html">The European Central Bank (ECB) take a look at bitcoin</a>
6911       </div>
6912       <div class="date">
6913          4th November 2012
6914       </div>
6915       <div class="body">
6916         <p>Slashdot just ran a story about the European Central Bank (ECB)
6917 <a href="http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf">releasing
6918 a report (PDF)</a> about virtual currencies and
6919 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>.  It is interesting to
6920 see how a member of the bitcoin community
6921 <a href="http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/10/30/the-ecb-report-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currencies.html">receive
6922 the report</a>.  As for the future, I suspect the central banks and
6923 the governments will outlaw bitcoin if it gain any popularity, to avoid
6924 competition.  My thoughts go to the
6925 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wörgl">Wörgl experiment</a> with
6926 negative inflation on cash which was such a success that it was
6927 terminated by the Austrian National Bank in 1933.  A successful
6928 alternative would be a threat to the current money system and gain
6929 powerful forces to work against it.</p>
6930
6931 <p>While checking out the current status of bitcoin, I also discovered
6932 that the community already seem to have
6933 <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/27/3271637/bitcoin-savings-trust-pyramid-scheme-shuts-down">experienced
6934 its first pyramid game / Ponzi scheme</a>.  Not very surprising, given
6935 how members of "small" communities tend to trust each other.  I guess
6936 enterprising crocks will try again and again, as they do anywhere
6937 wealth is available.</p>
6938
6939       </div>
6940       <div class="tags">
6941
6942
6943         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
6944
6945
6946       </div>
6947     </div>
6948     <div class="padding"></div>
6949
6950     <div class="entry">
6951       <div class="title">
6952         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/12_years_of_outages___summarised_by_Stuart_Kendrick.html">12 years of outages - summarised by Stuart Kendrick</a>
6953       </div>
6954       <div class="date">
6955         26th October 2012
6956       </div>
6957       <div class="body">
6958         <p>I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
6959 looking after the computers, mostly on the unix side, but in general
6960 all over the place.  I am also a member (and currently leader) of
6961 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG association</a>, which in turn
6962 make me a member of <a href="http://www.usenix.org/">USENIX</a>.  NUUG
6963 is an member organisation for us in Norway interested in free
6964 software, open standards and unix like operating systems, and USENIX
6965 is a US based member organisation with similar targets.  And thanks to
6966 these memberships, I get all issues of the great USENIX magazine
6967 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">;login:</a> in the
6968 mail several times a year.  The magazine is great, and I read most of
6969 it every time.</p>
6970
6971 <p>In the last issue of the USENIX magazine ;login:, there is an
6972 article by <a href="http://www.skendric.com/">Stuart Kendrick</a> from
6973 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center titled
6974 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/october-2012-volume-37-number-5/what-takes-us-down">What
6975 Takes Us Down</a>" (longer version also
6976 <a href="http://www.skendric.com/problem/incident-analysis/2012-06-30/What-Takes-Us-Down.pdf">available
6977 from his own site</a>), where he report what he found when he
6978 processed the outage reports (both planned and unplanned) from the
6979 last twelve years and classified them according to cause, time of day,
6980 etc etc.  The article is a good read to get some empirical data on
6981 what kind of problems affect a data centre, but what really inspired
6982 me was the kind of reporting they had put in place since 2000.<p>
6983
6984 <p>The centre set up a mailing list, and started to send fairly
6985 standardised messages to this list when a outage was planned or when
6986 it already occurred, to announce the plan and get feedback on the
6987 assumtions on scope and user impact.  Here is the two example from the
6988 article: First the unplanned outage:
6989
6990 <blockquote><pre>
6991 Subject:     Exchange 2003 Cluster Issues
6992 Severity:    Critical (Unplanned)
6993 Start:       Monday, May 7, 2012, 11:58
6994 End:         Monday, May 7, 2012, 12:38
6995 Duration:    40 minutes
6996 Scope:       Exchange 2003
6997 Description: The HTTPS service on the Exchange cluster crashed, triggering
6998              a cluster failover.
6999
7000 User Impact: During this period, all Exchange users were unable to
7001              access e-mail. Zimbra users were unaffected.
7002 Technician:  [xxx]
7003 </pre></blockquote>
7004
7005 Next the planned outage:
7006
7007 <blockquote><pre>
7008 Subject:     H Building Switch Upgrades
7009 Severity:    Major (Planned)
7010 Start:       Saturday, June 16, 2012, 06:00
7011 End:         Saturday, June 16, 2012, 16:00
7012 Duration:    10 hours
7013 Scope:       H2 Transport
7014 Description: Currently, Catalyst 4006s provide 10/100 Ethernet to end-
7015              stations. We will replace these with newer Catalyst
7016              4510s.
7017 User Impact: All users on H2 will be isolated from the network during
7018              this work. Afterward, they will have gigabit
7019              connectivity.
7020 Technician:  [xxx]
7021 </pre></blockquote>
7022
7023 <p>He notes in his article that the date formats and other fields have
7024 been a bit too free form to make it easy to automatically process them
7025 into a database for further analysis, and I would have used ISO 8601
7026 dates myself to make it easier to process (in other words I would ask
7027 people to write '2012-06-16 06:00 +0000' instead of the start time
7028 format listed above).  There are also other issues with the format
7029 that could be improved, read the article for the details.</p>
7030
7031 <p>I find the idea of standardising outage messages seem to be such a
7032 good idea that I would like to get it implemented here at the
7033 university too.  We do register
7034 <a href="http://www.uio.no/tjenester/it/aktuelt/planlagte-tjenesteavbrudd/">planned
7035 changes and outages in a calendar</a>, and report the to a mailing
7036 list, but we do not do so in a structured format and there is not a
7037 report to the same location for unplanned outages.  Perhaps something
7038 for other sites to consider too?</p>
7039
7040       </div>
7041       <div class="tags">
7042
7043
7044         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
7045
7046
7047       </div>
7048     </div>
7049     <div class="padding"></div>
7050
7051     <div class="entry">
7052       <div class="title">
7053         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Amazon_steal_books_from_customer_and_throw_out_her_out_without_any_explanation.html">Amazon steal books from customer and throw out her out without any explanation</a>
7054       </div>
7055       <div class="date">
7056         22nd October 2012
7057       </div>
7058       <div class="body">
7059         <p>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
7060 <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">how
7061 Amazon erased the books from a customer's kindle, locked the account
7062 and refuse to tell the customer why</a>.  If a real book store did
7063 this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property
7064 and theft.  The story has spread around the net today.  A bit more
7065 background information is available in Norwegian from
7066 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon">digi.no</a>.
7067 It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used
7068 this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was
7069 introduced many years back.  And Amazon proved in 2009 that it was
7070 willing to
7071 <a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html">
7072 break into customers equipment and remove the books</a> people had
7073 bought, when it removed the book 1984 by George Orwell from all the
7074 customers who had bought it.  From the official comments, it even
7075 sounded like
7076 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html">Amazon
7077 would never do that again</a>.  And here we are, three years
7078 later.</p>
7079
7080 <p>And thought this action is
7081 <a href="http://www.itavisen.no/904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende">against
7082 Norwegian regulations and law</a>, it is according to the terms of use
7083 as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to
7084 Norwegian laws.  It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms
7085 of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer
7086 rights.</p>
7087
7088 <p>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
7089 unacceptable terms.  For example
7090 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about 40,000
7091 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a> (1,652
7092 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The Internet
7093 Archive</a> (3,641,797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
7094 can read by anyone and shared with anyone.</p>
7095
7096 <p>Update 2012-10-23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
7097 the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
7098 restored the account of the user, as reported by
7099 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904675/helomvending-fra-amazon">digi.no</a>
7100 and <a href="http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/1.8368487">NRK</a>.
7101 Apparently public pressure work.  The story from Martin have seen
7102 several twitter messages per minute the last 24 hours, which is quite
7103 a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention.  But even when the
7104 account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist.  I recommend
7105 reading two opinions from
7106 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm">Simon
7107 Phipps</a> and
7108 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm">Glen
7109 Moody</a> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
7110 details about the original story.</p>
7111
7112       </div>
7113       <div class="tags">
7114
7115
7116         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
7117
7118
7119       </div>
7120     </div>
7121     <div class="padding"></div>
7122
7123     <div class="entry">
7124       <div class="title">
7125         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html">The fight for freedom and privacy</a>
7126       </div>
7127       <div class="date">
7128         18th October 2012
7129       </div>
7130       <div class="body">
7131         <p>Civil liberties and privacy in the western world are going down the
7132 drain, and it is hard to fight against it.  I try to do my best, but
7133 time is limited.  I hope you do your best too.  A few years ago I came
7134 across a marvellous drawing by
7135 <a href="http://www.claybennett.com/about.html">Clay Bennett</a>
7136 visualising some of what is going on.
7137
7138 <p><a href="http://www.claybennett.com/pages/security_fence.html">
7139 <img src="http://www.claybennett.com/images/archivetoons/security_fence.jpg"></a></p>
7140
7141 <blockquote>
7142 «They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
7143 safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.» - Benjamin Franklin
7144 </blockquote>
7145
7146 <p>Do you feel safe at the airport?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when
7147 you see a surveillance camera?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when you
7148 leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions?  I do not.  I
7149 just remember <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon">the
7150 Panopticon</a>, and can not help to think that we are slowly
7151 transforming our society to a huge Panopticon on our own.</p>
7152
7153       </div>
7154       <div class="tags">
7155
7156
7157         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
7158
7159
7160       </div>
7161     </div>
7162     <div class="padding"></div>
7163
7164     <div class="entry">
7165       <div class="title">
7166         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html">ColonHelp produser sue WordPress to silence critic</a>
7167       </div>
7168       <div class="date">
7169         12th October 2012
7170       </div>
7171       <div class="body">
7172         <p>Thanks to a blog post by
7173 <a href="http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.no/2012/10/a-shitstorm-is-comming.html">Eddy
7174 Petrișor</a>, I became aware of yet another "alternative medicine"
7175 company using legal intimidation tactics to scare off critics.
7176 According to the originating blog post about the detox "cure"
7177 <a href="http://insulaindoielii.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/colon-help-sues-wordpress/">ColonHelp
7178 and its producers Zenyth Pharmaceuticals actions</a>, the producer
7179 sues Wordpress to get rid of the critical information.  To check if
7180 the story was for real, I contacted Automattic, the company behind
7181 wordpress.com, and they reply was "We can confirm that Zenyth is
7182 seeking a court order against WordPress / Automattic.  However, we
7183 don't believe the Terms of Service have been violated in this
7184 matter".</p>
7185
7186 <p>The story seem to be simply that a blogger checked the scientific
7187 foundation for a popular health product in Rumania, ColonHelp, and
7188 reported that there was no reason at all to believe it improved the
7189 health of its users.  This caused the company behind the product,
7190 Zenyth Pharmaceuticals, to use legal intimidation to try to silence
7191 the critic, instead of presenting its views and scientific foundation
7192 to argue its side.</p>
7193
7194 <p>This is the usual story, and the Zenyth Pharmaceuticals company
7195 deserve everyone to know how it failed to act properly.  Lets hope the
7196 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect">Streisand
7197 effect</a> can make it rethink its strategy.</p>
7198
7199 <p>What is the harm, you might think.  I suggest you take a look at
7200 <a href="http://www.whatstheharm.net/detoxification.html">a list of
7201 victims of detoxification</a>.</p>
7202
7203       </div>
7204       <div class="tags">
7205
7206
7207         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis</a>.
7208
7209
7210       </div>
7211     </div>
7212     <div class="padding"></div>
7213
7214     <div class="entry">
7215       <div class="title">
7216         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_is_your_local_library_collecting_the__wrong__computer_books_.html">Why is your local library collecting the "wrong" computer books?</a>
7217       </div>
7218       <div class="date">
7219          3rd October 2012
7220       </div>
7221       <div class="body">
7222         <p>I just read the blog post from Tim Retout
7223 <a href="http://retout.co.uk/blog/2012/10/02/the-library-challenge">about
7224 the computer science book collection available in his local
7225 library</a>, and just wanted to share my comment on his theory about
7226 computer books becoming obsolete so soon.  That is part of the reason
7227 why the selection is so sad in almost any local library (it is in mine
7228 too), but I believe the major contributing factor is that the people
7229 buying books to the library have no way to know a good and future
7230 computer classic from trash.  And they need to know which one will
7231 become a classic in the future, as they would normally buy one of the
7232 recently published books.</p>
7233
7234 <p>During my university years, I worked for a while at the university
7235 library, and even there the person in charge of buying computer
7236 related books (and in fact any natural science related book), did not
7237 know enough about computers to make a good educated guess.  Once, just
7238 before Christmas, they had some leftover money on the book budget and
7239 I was asked if I could pick out a lot of computer books in the
7240 university book store, for the library to buy for their collection.  I
7241 had a great time picking all the books I dreamt of buying and reading,
7242 and the books I knew were classics (like most of the
7243 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens">Stevens
7244 collection</a>).  I picked several of the generic O'Reilly books (ie
7245 documenting protocols, formats and systems, not specific versions of
7246 products) and stayed away from the 'teach yourself X in N days' class.
7247 I had a great time, and probably picked out more than a hundred books
7248 for the library that evening.</p>
7249
7250 <p>The sad fact is that there is no way a overworked librarian is
7251 going to know that for example
7252 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming">The
7253 Practice of Programming</a> is a must-have in any computer library,
7254 and they will most of the time end up picking the wrong books to buy.
7255 Perhaps you can help your local library make better choices by giving
7256 the suggestions for books to get?  I know they would love to hear from
7257 you, even if their budget might block them from getting your favourite
7258 book right away.</p>
7259
7260       </div>
7261       <div class="tags">
7262
7263
7264         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7265
7266
7267       </div>
7268     </div>
7269     <div class="padding"></div>
7270
7271     <div class="entry">
7272       <div class="title">
7273         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Seventy_percent_done_with_Norwegian_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html">Seventy percent done with Norwegian docbook version of Free Culture</a>
7274       </div>
7275       <div class="date">
7276         23rd September 2012
7277       </div>
7278       <div class="body">
7279         <p>Since this summer, I have worked in my spare time on a Norwegian <a
7280 href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book <a
7281 href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
7282 The reason is that this book is a great primer on what problems exist
7283 in the current copyright laws, and I want it to be available also for
7284 those that are reluctant do read an English book.
7285
7286 When I started, I
7287 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
7288 for volunteers</a> to help me, but too few have volunteered so far,
7289 and progress is a bit slow.  Anyway, today I broken the 70 percent
7290 mark for the first rough translation.  At the moment, less than 700
7291 strings (paragraphs, index terms, titles) are left to translate.  With
7292 my current progress of 10-20 strings per day, it will take a while to
7293 complete the translation.  This graph show the updated progress:</p>
7294
7295 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
7296
7297 <p>Progress have slowed down lately due to family and work
7298 commitments.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out
7299 the project files currently available from
7300 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
7301
7302 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
7303 the updated
7304 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
7305 and
7306 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
7307 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
7308 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
7309 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
7310
7311       </div>
7312       <div class="tags">
7313
7314
7315         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
7316
7317
7318       </div>
7319     </div>
7320     <div class="padding"></div>
7321
7322     <div class="entry">
7323       <div class="title">
7324         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html">Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda</a>
7325       </div>
7326       <div class="date">
7327         17th September 2012
7328       </div>
7329       <div class="body">
7330         <p>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
7331 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
7332 community, I finally found time to wrap up another.  This time it is
7333 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
7334 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
7335 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
7336 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.</p>
7337
7338 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
7339
7340 <p>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
7341 in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
7342 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
7343 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
7344 IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
7345 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
7346 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
7347 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
7348 training is anyway very important</p>
7349
7350 <p>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
7351 <a href="http://www.spse.ch/">SPSE school</a> (secondary) is a very
7352 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
7353 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
7354 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
7355
7356 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
7357 project?</strong></p>
7358
7359 <p>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
7360 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
7361 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
7362 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
7363 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
7364 hole.</p>
7365
7366 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
7367 Edu?</strong></p>
7368
7369 <p>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
7370 very generous for help and hints.  Chat help is crucial, together with
7371 the mailing list.  Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
7372 engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
7373 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
7374 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
7375 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
7376 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
7377 hassle.</p>
7378
7379 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
7380 Edu?</strong></p>
7381
7382 <p>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
7383 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
7384 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
7385 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
7386 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
7387 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
7388 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
7389 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)</p>
7390
7391 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
7392
7393 <p>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
7394 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
7395 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
7396 <a href="http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html">Perceus</a>
7397 has the same...</p>
7398
7399 <p>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
7400 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
7401 something breaks.  Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
7402 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.</p>
7403
7404 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
7405 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
7406
7407 <P>I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
7408 cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
7409 just because they are normally not open to change.</p>
7410
7411 <p>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
7412 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
7413 don't.</p>
7414
7415 <p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
7416 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
7417 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
7418 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
7419 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
7420 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
7421 Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>
7422
7423       </div>
7424       <div class="tags">
7425
7426
7427         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
7428
7429
7430       </div>
7431     </div>
7432     <div class="padding"></div>
7433
7434     <div class="entry">
7435       <div class="title">
7436         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html">IETF activity to standardise video codec</a>
7437       </div>
7438       <div class="date">
7439         15th September 2012
7440       </div>
7441       <div class="body">
7442         <p>After the
7443 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">Opus
7444 codec made</a> it into <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> as
7445 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716</a>, I had a look
7446 to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
7447 too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
7448 area.  A non-"working group" mailing list
7449 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec">video-codec</a>
7450 was
7451 <a href="http://ietf.10.n7.nabble.com/New-Non-WG-Mailing-List-video-codec-Video-codec-BoF-discussion-list-td119548.html">created 2012-08-20</a>.  It is intended to discuss the topic and if a
7452 formal working group should be formed.</p>
7453
7454 <p>I look forward to see how this plays out.  There is already
7455 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/video-codec/current/msg00003.html">an
7456 email from someone</a> in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
7457 participate in the ISO group.  Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
7458 that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
7459 multimedia formats requiring royalty payments, I suspect
7460 joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
7461 involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.</p>
7462
7463 <p>If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
7464 join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
7465 IETF.</p>
7466
7467       </div>
7468       <div class="tags">
7469
7470
7471         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
7472
7473
7474       </div>
7475     </div>
7476     <div class="padding"></div>
7477
7478     <div class="entry">
7479       <div class="title">
7480         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">IETF standardize its first multimedia codec: Opus</a>
7481       </div>
7482       <div class="date">
7483         12th September 2012
7484       </div>
7485       <div class="body">
7486         <p>Yesterday, <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> announced the
7487 publication of of
7488 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716, the Definition
7489 of the Opus Audio Codec</a>, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec
7490 intended for both VoIP, film and music.  This is the first time, as
7491 far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec.  In
7492 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3533">RFC 3533</a>, IETF
7493 standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great
7494 royalty free container for audio, video and movies.  I hope IETF will
7495 continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG
7496 have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish
7497 multimedia content on the Internet.</p>
7498
7499 <p>IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to
7500 ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty
7501 free specifications.  Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and
7502 poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet.</p>
7503
7504 <p>Visit the <a href="http://opus-codec.org/">Opus project page</a> if
7505 you want to learn more about the solution.</p>
7506
7507       </div>
7508       <div class="tags">
7509
7510
7511         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
7512
7513
7514       </div>
7515     </div>
7516     <div class="padding"></div>
7517
7518     <div class="entry">
7519       <div class="title">
7520         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Git repository for song book for Computer Scientists</a>
7521       </div>
7522       <div class="date">
7523          7th September 2012
7524       </div>
7525       <div class="body">
7526         <p>As I
7527 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
7528 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
7529 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
7530 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
7531 repository for the project</a>.</p>
7532
7533 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
7534 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
7535 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
7536 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
7537
7538 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
7539 PostScript formats at
7540 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
7541 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
7542
7543       </div>
7544       <div class="tags">
7545
7546
7547         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
7548
7549
7550       </div>
7551     </div>
7552     <div class="padding"></div>
7553
7554     <div class="entry">
7555       <div class="title">
7556         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_forced_Microsoft_to_open_Office__and_don_t_forget_Officeshots_.html">Free software forced Microsoft to open Office (and don't forget Officeshots)</a>
7557       </div>
7558       <div class="date">
7559         23rd August 2012
7560       </div>
7561       <div class="body">
7562         <p>I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how
7563 <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsoft-was-forced-open-office-200233">Microsoft
7564 have been forced to open Office</a>, and it made me remember and
7565 revisit the great site
7566 <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">officeshots</a> which allow you
7567 to check out how different programs present the ODF file format.  I
7568 recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)</p>
7569
7570       </div>
7571       <div class="tags">
7572
7573
7574         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
7575
7576
7577       </div>
7578     </div>
7579     <div class="padding"></div>
7580
7581     <div class="entry">
7582       <div class="title">
7583         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_way_there_with_translated_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html">Half way there with translated docbook version of Free Culture</a>
7584       </div>
7585       <div class="date">
7586         17th August 2012
7587       </div>
7588       <div class="body">
7589         <p>In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian
7590 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
7591 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
7592 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law
7593 I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an
7594 English book.  It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever
7595 expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society.  When the
7596 translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy
7597 to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down
7598 to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law.  This
7599 summer I
7600 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
7601 for volunteers</a> to help me, and I have been able to secure the
7602 valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.</p>
7603
7604 <p>Two days ago, we finally broke the 50% mark.  Then more than 50% of
7605 the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also
7606 titles and index entries are also counted).  All parts from the
7607 beginning up to and including chapter four is translated.  So is
7608 chapters six, seven and the conclusion.  I created a graph to show the
7609 progress:</p>
7610
7611 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
7612
7613 <p>The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index
7614 entries into the docbook.  They were missing with the docbook version
7615 I initially started with.  There are still quite a few index entries
7616 missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done.  I
7617 currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete
7618 english version of the docbook source.</p>
7619
7620 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
7621 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
7622 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
7623 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
7624 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
7625 around?  I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to
7626 me.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the
7627 project files currently available from <a
7628 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
7629
7630 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
7631 the updated
7632 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
7633 and
7634 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
7635 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
7636 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
7637 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
7638
7639       </div>
7640       <div class="tags">
7641
7642
7643         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
7644
7645
7646       </div>
7647     </div>
7648     <div class="padding"></div>
7649
7650     <div class="entry">
7651       <div class="title">
7652         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Notes_on_language_codes_for_Norwegian_docbook_processing___.html">Notes on language codes for Norwegian docbook processing...</a>
7653       </div>
7654       <div class="date">
7655         10th August 2012
7656       </div>
7657       <div class="body">
7658         <p>In <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> one can specify
7659 the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
7660 this information to pick the correct translations for 'chapter', 'see
7661 also', 'index' etc.  And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
7662 this work just fine.  For example a German user can start the document
7663 with &lt;book lang="de"&gt;, and the document will show up with the
7664 correct content with any of the docbook processors.  This is not the
7665 case for the language
7666 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">I
7667 am working with at the moment</a>, Norwegian Bokmål.</p>
7668
7669 <p>For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
7670 because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
7671 all tools.  I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
7672 dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way.  Some
7673 of them do not handle it at all.</p>
7674
7675 <p>A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
7676 this mess.  Norwegian is not one, but two written variants.  The
7677 variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål.  There are three
7678 two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
7679 is 'no', Norwegian Nynorsk is 'nn' and Norwegian Bokmål is 'nb'.
7680 Historically the 'no' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
7681 many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
7682 is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
7683 In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure 'no' was an
7684 alias for 'nb'.</p>
7685
7686 <p>Back to docbook processing tools in Debian.  The dblatex tool only
7687 understand 'nn'.  There are translations for 'no', but not 'nb' (BTS
7688 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/684391">#684391</a>), but due to a bug
7689 (BTS <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">#682936</a>) the 'no'
7690 language code is not recognised.  The docbook-xsl tool chain only
7691 recognise 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The xmlto tool only recognise
7692 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The end result that there is no language
7693 code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
7694 at the same time. :(</p>
7695
7696 <p>The correct solution is to use &lt;book lang="nb"&gt;, but it will
7697 take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
7698 processors. :(</p>
7699
7700 <p>Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/</p>
7701
7702       </div>
7703       <div class="tags">
7704
7705
7706         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
7707
7708
7709       </div>
7710     </div>
7711     <div class="padding"></div>
7712
7713     <div class="entry">
7714       <div class="title">
7715         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html">Best way to create a docbook book?</a>
7716       </div>
7717       <div class="date">
7718         31st July 2012
7719       </div>
7720       <div class="body">
7721         <p>I tried to send this text to the
7722 <a href="https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/">docbook-apps
7723 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org</a>, but it only accept messages
7724 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
7725 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
7726 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
7727 out.</p>
7728
7729 <p>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
7730 learning curve at the moment.</p>
7731
7732 <p>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
7733 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
7734 docbook to handle the process.  The files to build the book are
7735 available from
7736 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.
7737 The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
7738 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
7739 software docbook processors.  My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
7740 Squeeze.</p>
7741
7742 <p>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
7743 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
7744 formats.  I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
7745 problems.</p>
7746
7747 <ul>
7748
7749 <li>Using dblatex, the &lt;part&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
7750    as &lt;/part&gt; do not really end the &lt;part&gt;. (See
7751    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683166">BTS report #683166</a>), the
7752    xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
7753    index references spanning several pages (See
7754    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682901">BTS report #682901</a>), and
7755    I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
7756    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">BTS report #682936</a>).</li>
7757
7758 <li>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
7759    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683163">BTS report
7760    #683163</a>).</li>
7761
7762 <li>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
7763    show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
7764    footnote and text body, see
7765    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683197">BTS report #683197</a>), and
7766    fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
7767    refs listed are not right).</li>
7768
7769 <li>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.</li>
7770
7771 <li>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
7772    index problems the xmlto + fop processing.</li>
7773
7774 </ul>
7775
7776 <p>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
7777 of this book?  Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
7778 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?</p>
7779
7780 <p>What about HTML and EPUB versions?</p>
7781
7782       </div>
7783       <div class="tags">
7784
7785
7786         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
7787
7788
7789       </div>
7790     </div>
7791     <div class="padding"></div>
7792
7793     <div class="entry">
7794       <div class="title">
7795         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">Free Culture in Norwegian - 5 chapters done, 74 percent left to do</a>
7796       </div>
7797       <div class="date">
7798         21st July 2012
7799       </div>
7800       <div class="body">
7801         <p>I reported earlier that I am working on
7802 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">a
7803 norwegian version</a> of the book
7804 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
7805 Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
7806 Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six.  The source files as well as a
7807 PDF and EPUB version of this book are available from
7808 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
7809
7810 <p>I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
7811 (preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
7812 completely translated.  This completes 26 percent of the number of
7813 strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus 74
7814 percent left to translate.  A graph of the progress is present at the
7815 bottom of the github project page.  There is still room for more
7816 contributors.  Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
7817 you got time and are willing to help make this book make it to
7818 print. :)</p>
7819
7820 <p>The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
7821 translations, if you want the book to be available in your
7822 language.</p>
7823
7824       </div>
7825       <div class="tags">
7826
7827
7828         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
7829
7830
7831       </div>
7832     </div>
7833     <div class="padding"></div>
7834
7835     <div class="entry">
7836       <div class="title">
7837         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Call_for_help_from_docbook_expert_to_tag_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig.html">Call for help from docbook expert to tag Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a>
7838       </div>
7839       <div class="date">
7840         16th July 2012
7841       </div>
7842       <div class="body">
7843         <p>I am currently working on a
7844 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">project
7845 to translate</a> the book
7846 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig
7847 to Norwegian.  And the source we base our translation on is the
7848 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook">docbook</a> version, to
7849 allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
7850 this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
7851 tagged.  The source files of this project is available from
7852 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
7853
7854 <p>The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
7855 no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert.  Is there a
7856 docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
7857 well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
7858 for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book?  This will provide a
7859 well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
7860 easier for us to create a good Norwegian version.  If you can and want
7861 to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
7862 send pull requests with fixes. :)</p>
7863
7864       </div>
7865       <div class="tags">
7866
7867
7868         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
7869
7870
7871       </div>
7872     </div>
7873     <div class="padding"></div>
7874
7875     <div class="entry">
7876       <div class="title">
7877         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html">Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg</a>
7878       </div>
7879       <div class="date">
7880          9th July 2012
7881       </div>
7882       <div class="body">
7883         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
7884 Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
7885 recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
7886 country Sweden.  This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
7887 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
7888 to adjust and scale the just released
7889 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
7890 Wheezy</a> setup to his liking.  He granted me an interview, and I am
7891 happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
7892
7893 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
7894
7895 <p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
7896 the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
7897 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
7898 "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups.  In
7899 Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
7900 in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
7901 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
7902 perspective when working with IT.</p>
7903
7904 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
7905 project?</strong></p>
7906
7907 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
7908 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
7909 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
7910 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
7911 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
7912 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
7913
7914 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
7915 Edu?</strong></p>
7916
7917 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
7918 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
7919 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
7920 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
7921 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
7922 well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
7923 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
7924 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
7925 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
7926 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
7927 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
7928 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
7929 thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
7930 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
7931 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
7932 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
7933 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
7934 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time.  Our
7935 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
7936 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
7937 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
7938 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
7939 quicker to update.
7940
7941 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
7942 Edu?</strong></p>
7943
7944 <p>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
7945 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
7946 year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
7947 sound from working with them.  It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
7948 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
7949 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
7950
7951 <p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
7952 install time.  In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
7953 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
7954 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
7955 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
7956 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
7957 support for single-sign on.  That will make the transition to free
7958 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
7959 need.  No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
7960 some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
7961 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes.  We run a journalist
7962 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
7963 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association).  Our
7964 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
7965 are done.  This is important if you want to get a job.</p>
7966
7967 <p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
7968 magazines.  We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
7969 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
7970 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
7971 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
7972 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
7973 edit and compile a newspaper.  But politically at our school we are not
7974 there yet.  And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
7975
7976 <p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
7977 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
7978 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
7979 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
7980 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
7981 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
7982 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
7983 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise.  Those
7984 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
7985 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
7986 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
7987 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
7988 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
7989 sound file.</p>
7990
7991 <p>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
7992 will try.  The problem is the students have certain expectations when
7993 they start an education towards a profession.  So the programs has to
7994 look and feel professional.  Good thing with radio, there are many
7995 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
7996 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
7997 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
7998 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
7999 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
8000
8001 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
8002
8003 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days.  I use almost
8004 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
8005 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
8006 )</p>
8007
8008 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
8009 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
8010
8011 <p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
8012 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
8013 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
8014 flawlessly.  The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
8015 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
8016 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
8017 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
8018 idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
8019 the administration.  It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
8020 open source, if the principal has to run Windows.  It also creates a
8021 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
8022 will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
8023 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
8024 desktop is essential.  At least at our school, where we have mixed
8025 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
8026
8027 <p>Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
8028 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
8029 article <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/">Radio station
8030 management with Airtime</a>,
8031 <a href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/">Airtime</a> which
8032 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
8033 <a href="http://www.rivendellaudio.org/">Rivendell</a> which claim to
8034 be complete radio broadcast automation solution.  All of them seem
8035 useful to the aspiring radio producer.</p>
8036
8037       </div>
8038       <div class="tags">
8039
8040
8041         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
8042
8043
8044       </div>
8045     </div>
8046     <div class="padding"></div>
8047
8048     <div class="entry">
8049       <div class="title">
8050         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html">Why do schools waste money on IT?</a>
8051       </div>
8052       <div class="date">
8053          8th July 2012
8054       </div>
8055       <div class="body">
8056         <p>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
8057 of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
8058 in schools and municipalities.  We provide what the happy users of
8059 Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
8060 alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution.  I
8061 was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
8062 Steinberg in his blog post
8063 "<a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2012/06/19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/">Can
8064 you recognize the million pound chair?</a>".  Read it and weep for the
8065 spending of your tax money.</p>
8066
8067 <p>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
8068 projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
8069 causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
8070 to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
8071 public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
8072 purchases.</p>
8073
8074       </div>
8075       <div class="tags">
8076
8077
8078         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8079
8080
8081       </div>
8082     </div>
8083     <div class="padding"></div>
8084
8085     <div class="entry">
8086       <div class="title">
8087         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html">Free Timetabling Software - nice free software</a>
8088       </div>
8089       <div class="date">
8090          7th July 2012
8091       </div>
8092       <div class="body">
8093         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
8094 Skolelinux</a> is a large collection of end user and school specific
8095 software.  It is one of the packages not installed by default but
8096 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
8097 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
8098 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
8099 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
8100 receive.  The software is
8101
8102 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/">named FET</a>, and it provide a
8103 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
8104 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
8105 both teachers and students.  It is available both for
8106 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html">Linux, MacOSX and
8107 Windows</a>.</p>
8108
8109 <p>This is <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html">the
8110 feature list</a>, liftet from the project web site:</p>
8111
8112 <p><ul>
8113
8114   <li>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
8115     You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it </li>
8116
8117   <li>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
8118     (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
8119     (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
8120     (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
8121     (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
8122     (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
8123     sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
8124     (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
8125     </li>
8126
8127   <li>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
8128     semi-automatic or manual allocation</li>
8129
8130   <li>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
8131     GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports </li>
8132
8133   <li>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
8134     with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)</li>
8135
8136   <li>Import/export from CSV format</li>
8137
8138   <li>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
8139     formats </li>
8140
8141   <li>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
8142     and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
8143     non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
8144     (as separate sets)</li>
8145
8146   <li>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
8147     (but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
8148     percentage)</li>
8149
8150   <li>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
8151     demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
8152     memory):
8153     <ul>
8154       <li>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60</li>
8155       <li>Maximum number of working days per week: 35</li>
8156       <li>Maximum total number of teachers: 6000</li>
8157       <li>Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000</li>
8158       <li>Maximum total number of subjects: 6000</li>
8159       <li>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags</li>
8160       <li>Maximum number of activities: 30000</li>
8161       <li>Maximum number of rooms: 6000</li>
8162       <li>Maximum number of buildings: 6000</li>
8163       <li>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
8164           students sets for each activity.  (it is possible
8165           also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
8166           activity)</li>
8167       <li>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints</li>
8168       <li>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints</li>
8169     </ul></li>
8170
8171   <li>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
8172     <ul>
8173       <li>Break periods</li>
8174       <li>For teacher(s):
8175         <ul>
8176           <li>Not available periods</li>
8177           <li>Max/min days per week</li>
8178           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
8179           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
8180           <li>Min hours daily</li>
8181           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
8182
8183           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
8184             days per week</li>
8185         </ul></li>
8186       <li>For students (sets):
8187         <ul>
8188           <li>Not available periods</li>
8189           <li>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)</li>
8190           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
8191           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
8192           <li>Min hours daily</li>
8193           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
8194
8195           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
8196             days per week</li>
8197         </ul></li>
8198       <li>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
8199         <ul>
8200           <li>A single preferred starting time</li>
8201           <li>A set of preferred starting times</li>
8202           <li>A set of preferred time slots</li>
8203           <li>Min/max days between them</li>
8204           <li>End(s) students day</li>
8205           <li>Same starting time/day/hour</li>
8206           <li>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
8207             flexible constraint, useful in many situations)</li>
8208           <li>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)</li>
8209           <li>Not overlapping</li>
8210           <li>Max simultaneous in selected time slots</li>
8211           <li>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities</li>
8212         </ul></li>
8213     </ul></li>
8214
8215   <li>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
8216     <ul>
8217       <li>Room not available periods</li>
8218       <li>For teacher(s):
8219         <ul>
8220           <li>Home room(s)</li>
8221           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
8222           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
8223         </ul>
8224       </li>
8225
8226       <li>For students (sets):
8227         <ul>
8228           <li>Home room(s)</li>
8229           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
8230           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
8231         </ul>
8232       </li>
8233       <li>Preferred room(s):
8234         <ul>
8235           <li>For a subject</li>
8236           <li>For an activity tag</li>
8237           <li>For a subject and an activity tag</li>
8238           <li>Individually for a (sub)activity</li>
8239         </ul>
8240       </li>
8241
8242       <li>For a set of activities:
8243         <ul>
8244           <li>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms</li>
8245         </ul>
8246       </li>
8247     </ul>
8248   </li>
8249 </ul></p>
8250
8251 <p>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
8252 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it.  If you
8253 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
8254 manually, check it out.
8255
8256 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
8257 <a href="http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/2012/03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/">a
8258 blog post from MarvelSoft</a>.  If you find FET useful, please provide
8259 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
8260 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos">Debian Edu HowTo
8261 section</a>.</p>
8262
8263       </div>
8264       <div class="tags">
8265
8266
8267         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8268
8269
8270       </div>
8271     </div>
8272     <div class="padding"></div>
8273
8274     <div class="entry">
8275       <div class="title">
8276         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Can_Zimbra_be_told_to_send_autoreplies_to_the_From__address_.html">Can Zimbra be told to send autoreplies to the From: address?</a>
8277       </div>
8278       <div class="date">
8279          3rd July 2012
8280       </div>
8281       <div class="body">
8282         <p>In the NUUG <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a>
8283 project (Norwegian version of
8284 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> from
8285 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>), we have discovered
8286 a problem with the municipalities using
8287 <a href="http://www.zimbra.com/">Zimbra</a>.  When FiksGataMi send a
8288 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
8289 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
8290 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address.  The intention is to make
8291 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
8292 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
8293 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
8294 Zimbra.  Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
8295 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
8296 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
8297 the From: header.</p>
8298
8299 <p>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
8300 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
8301 problem.  We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
8302 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
8303 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports.  We have been in
8304 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
8305 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
8306 behaviour.</p>
8307
8308 <p>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
8309 to the specification in RFC 3834, which recommend that vacation
8310 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
8311 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
8312 differently.  Anyone know?  Please let us know at
8313 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
8314 (at) nuug.no</a>.</p>
8315
8316       </div>
8317       <div class="tags">
8318
8319
8320         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
8321
8322
8323       </div>
8324     </div>
8325     <div class="padding"></div>
8326
8327     <div class="entry">
8328       <div class="title">
8329         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jos__Luis_Redrejo_Rodr_guez.html">Debian Edu interview: José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez</a>
8330       </div>
8331       <div class="date">
8332         26th June 2012
8333       </div>
8334       <div class="body">
8335         <p>I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
8336 another interview with the people behind
8337 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
8338 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
8339 helpers from Spain.  His effort was the reason we added support for
8340 several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
8341 Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
8342 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
8343 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
8344
8345 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
8346
8347 <p>I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
8348 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
8349 ICT in schools</p>
8350
8351 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
8352 project?</strong></p>
8353
8354 <p>At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
8355 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
8356 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
8357 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.</p>
8358
8359 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
8360 Edu?</strong></p>
8361
8362 <p>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
8363 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
8364 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
8365 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.</p>
8366
8367 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
8368 Edu?</strong></p>
8369
8370 <p>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
8371 economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
8372 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
8373 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
8374 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
8375 technologies in school.</p>
8376
8377 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
8378
8379 <p>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
8380 between Iceweasel, <a href="http://www.geany.org/">Geany</a> and
8381 <a href="http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator">Terminator</a>.</p>
8382
8383 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
8384 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
8385
8386 <p>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
8387 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
8388 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
8389 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.</p>
8390
8391 <p>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
8392 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
8393 universities. So different strategies are needed.</p>
8394
8395 <p>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
8396 we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
8397 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
8398 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
8399 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
8400 using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
8401 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
8402 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
8403 working there.</p>
8404
8405       </div>
8406       <div class="tags">
8407
8408
8409         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
8410
8411
8412       </div>
8413     </div>
8414     <div class="padding"></div>
8415
8416     <div class="entry">
8417       <div class="title">
8418         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
8419       </div>
8420       <div class="date">
8421         24th June 2012
8422       </div>
8423       <div class="body">
8424         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
8425 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
8426 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
8427 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
8428 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
8429 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
8430 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
8431 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
8432 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
8433 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
8434 missing in my book.</p>
8435
8436 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
8437 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
8438 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
8439 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
8440 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
8441 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
8442 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
8443
8444       </div>
8445       <div class="tags">
8446
8447
8448         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
8449
8450
8451       </div>
8452     </div>
8453     <div class="padding"></div>
8454
8455     <div class="entry">
8456       <div class="title">
8457         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___some_ideas_for_the_future_versions.html">Debian Edu - some ideas for the future versions</a>
8458       </div>
8459       <div class="date">
8460         11th June 2012
8461       </div>
8462       <div class="body">
8463         <p>During my work on
8464 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.nb.html">Debian Edu
8465 based on Squeeze</a>, I came across some issues that should be
8466 addressed in the Wheezy release.  I finally found time to wrap up my
8467 notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
8468 explanation.</p>
8469
8470 <p><ul>
8471
8472 <li>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
8473 changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
8474 with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
8475 system depend on tasksel tasks in
8476 /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
8477 installation.</li>
8478
8479 <li>Enable Kerberos login for more services.  Now with the Kerberos
8480 foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
8481 services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions.  We should
8482 at least try to enable it for these services:
8483 <ul>
8484
8485   <li>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
8486     quotas.</li>
8487   <li>Nagios for admins checking the system status.</li>
8488   <li>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.</li>
8489   <li>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.</li>
8490   <li>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.</li>
8491   <li>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.</li>
8492
8493 </ul></li>
8494
8495 <li>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
8496 authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
8497 use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
8498 is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind</li>
8499
8500 <li>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install.  The split made
8501 sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
8502 inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.</li>
8503
8504 <li>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
8505 touching the disk if the disk is too small.  This is
8506 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/653305">BTS report #653305</a> and the
8507 d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
8508 it and upload.  After this is done we need to adjust
8509 debian-edu-install to use this new hook.</li>
8510
8511 <li>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
8512 time config).  LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
8513 packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
8514 in Wheezy.
8515
8516 <li>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
8517 the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
8518 up KDE login on slow networks.</li>
8519
8520 <li>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
8521 change on first login.  This is useful when handing out password on
8522 paper, to make sure only the user know the password.  This require
8523 fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.</li>
8524
8525 <li>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
8526 The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
8527 familiar with GUIs.  This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
8528 have it available where the admin will be looking for it..</li>
8529
8530 <li>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
8531 actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses).  None of the
8532 Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.</li>
8533
8534 <li>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
8535 using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
8536 packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.</li>
8537
8538 <li>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
8539 when changing password using the Kerberos protocol.  The hook was
8540 requested in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/588968">BTS report
8541 #588968</a> and is now available in Wheezy.  We might need to write a
8542 MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.</li>
8543
8544 <li>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
8545 <ul>
8546
8547 <li>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers</li>
8548 <li>consider dropping xpaint</li>
8549 <li>and probably more?</li>
8550 </ul></li>
8551
8552 <li>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly.  This is
8553 mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
8554 examples too.  For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
8555 firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
8556 some GUI to do this.  Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
8557 could consider using their packages.  At the moment we have some
8558 command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
8559 for the LTSP chroot).</li>
8560
8561
8562 <li>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options.  We
8563 should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
8564 install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
8565 use.</li>
8566
8567 <li>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
8568 interesting educational packages.  We should work on the package
8569 tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
8570 packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
8571 new applications with a simple mouse click.</li>
8572
8573 <li>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
8574 with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
8575 be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
8576 filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled.  We should
8577 implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
8578 instead of the "it is documented" method of today.</li>
8579
8580 <li>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
8581 "take over" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
8582 There are at least three implementations,
8583 <a href="italc.sourceforge.net/">italc</a>,
8584 <a href="http://www.itais.net/help/en/">controlaula</a> og
8585 <a href="http://www.epoptes.org/">epoptes</a> and we should pick one of
8586 them and make it trivial to set it up in a school.  The challenges is
8587 how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
8588 and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
8589 given room.</li>
8590
8591 <li>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
8592 should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
8593 the Debian Edu network.  Not quite sure how.  Perhaps we should
8594 provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
8595 them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
8596 configuration and data with the central server.  This should be
8597 investigated.</li>
8598
8599 </ul></p>
8600
8601 <p>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
8602 version.</p>
8603
8604       </div>
8605       <div class="tags">
8606
8607
8608         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8609
8610
8611       </div>
8612     </div>
8613     <div class="padding"></div>
8614
8615     <div class="entry">
8616       <div class="title">
8617         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/TV_with_face_recognition__for_improved_viewer_experience.html">TV with face recognition, for improved viewer experience</a>
8618       </div>
8619       <div class="date">
8620          9th June 2012
8621       </div>
8622       <div class="body">
8623         <p>Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
8624 <a href="http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/12/06/09/0012247/intel-to-launch-tv-service-with-facial-recognition-by-end-of-the-year">TV
8625 with face recognition</a> to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
8626 me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
8627 recognition on the TV image itself.  It could let the viewer know who
8628 is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
8629 company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
8630 evaluate what is being said and done.  That would be a feature I would
8631 be willing to pay for.</p>
8632
8633 <p>I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
8634 household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
8635 It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
8636 <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt">1984 by George
8637 Orwell</a>.</p>
8638
8639       </div>
8640       <div class="tags">
8641
8642
8643         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
8644
8645
8646       </div>
8647     </div>
8648     <div class="padding"></div>
8649
8650     <div class="entry">
8651       <div class="title">
8652         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_service_to_look_up_HP_and_Dell_computer_hardware_support_status.html">Web service to look up HP and Dell computer hardware support status</a>
8653       </div>
8654       <div class="date">
8655          6th June 2012
8656       </div>
8657       <div class="body">
8658         <p>A few days ago
8659 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">I
8660 reported how to get</a> the support status out of Dell using an
8661 unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
8662 <a href="http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2012-February/045959.html">discovered
8663 by Daniel De Marco in february</a>.  Combined with my web scraping
8664 code for HP, Dell and IBM
8665 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">from
8666 2009</a>, I got inspired and wrote
8667 <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/">a
8668 web service</a> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
8669 support status and get a machine readable result back.</p>
8670
8671 <p>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
8672 output:
8673
8674 <blockquote><pre>
8675 % GET <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/?format=json&vendor=Dell&servicetag=2v1xwn1">https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/?format=json&vendor=Dell&servicetag=2v1xwn1</a>
8676 supportstatus({"servicetag": "2v1xwn1", "warrantyend": "2013-11-24", "shipped": "2010-11-24", "scrapestamputc": "2012-06-06T20:26:56.965847", "scrapedurl": "http://143.166.84.118/services/assetservice.asmx?WSDL", "vendor": "Dell", "productid": ""})
8677 %
8678 </pre></blockquote>
8679
8680 <p>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
8681 support for other vendors.  The python source is available on
8682 Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.</p>
8683
8684       </div>
8685       <div class="tags">
8686
8687
8688         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
8689
8690
8691       </div>
8692     </div>
8693     <div class="padding"></div>
8694
8695     <div class="entry">
8696       <div class="title">
8697         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</a>
8698       </div>
8699       <div class="date">
8700          2nd June 2012
8701       </div>
8702       <div class="body">
8703         <p>Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
8704 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
8705 mailing list.  He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
8706 thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
8707 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
8708 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
8709
8710 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
8711
8712 <p>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
8713 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
8714 (Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
8715 by Angela).</p>
8716
8717 <p>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
8718 and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
8719 touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
8720 the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
8721 becoming an osteopath.</p>
8722
8723 <p>Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
8724 have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
8725 introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
8726 "IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
8727 skills with communication skills.</p>
8728
8729 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
8730 project?</strong></p>
8731
8732 <p>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
8733 "IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
8734 reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
8735 people said.  From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
8736 distributions that target being used for school networks.</p>
8737
8738 <p>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
8739 commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
8740 Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
8741 went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
8742 and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
8743 Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
8744 got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
8745 attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
8746 the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.</p>
8747
8748 <p>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
8749 people.  People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
8750 protection experts, other IT professionals.</p>
8751
8752 <p>We came to two conclusions:</p>
8753
8754 <p>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
8755 bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
8756 by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
8757 whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
8758 IT solution.  The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
8759 customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
8760 possible.  In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
8761 standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
8762 degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
8763 locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
8764 point.</p>
8765
8766 <p>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
8767 all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
8768 for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
8769 has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
8770 of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
8771 tries to provide an approach for this.</p>
8772
8773 <p>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
8774 defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
8775 Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
8776 equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
8777 teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
8778 spare time.</p>
8779
8780 <p>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
8781 networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
8782 here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
8783 teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
8784 non-existent until 2010/2011.</p>
8785
8786 <p>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
8787 class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
8788 avoidance do exist.</p>
8789
8790 <p>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
8791 social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
8792 for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
8793 several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
8794 they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
8795 at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
8796 and probably a gain for all.</p>
8797
8798 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
8799 Edu?</strong></p>
8800
8801 <p>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
8802 any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
8803 the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
8804 workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
8805 project communication, honest communication within the group of
8806 developers, etc.</p>
8807
8808 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
8809 Edu?</strong></p>
8810
8811 <p>Every coin has two sides:</p>
8812
8813 <p>Technically: <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/311188">BTS issue
8814 #311188</a>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
8815 client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
8816 should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
8817 about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
8818 several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
8819 contribute).</p>
8820
8821 <p>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
8822 find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
8823 Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
8824 promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
8825 there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
8826 these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
8827 all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
8828 meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
8829 there being rather disconnected from the development department of
8830 Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
8831
8832 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
8833
8834 <p>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.</p>
8835
8836 <p>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
8837 serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
8838 more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.</p>
8839
8840 <p>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
8841 development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
8842 PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
8843 is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.</p>
8844
8845 <p>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
8846 as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
8847 I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
8848 the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
8849 whiteboard.</p>
8850
8851 <p>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.</p>
8852
8853 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
8854 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
8855
8856 <p>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
8857 enrol people.</p>
8858
8859       </div>
8860       <div class="tags">
8861
8862
8863         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
8864
8865
8866       </div>
8867     </div>
8868     <div class="padding"></div>
8869
8870     <div class="entry">
8871       <div class="title">
8872         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">SOAP based webservice from Dell to check server support status</a>
8873       </div>
8874       <div class="date">
8875          1st June 2012
8876       </div>
8877       <div class="body">
8878         <p>A few years ago I wrote
8879 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">how
8880 to extract support status</a> for your Dell and HP servers.  Recently
8881 I have learned from colleges here at the
8882 <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> that Dell have
8883 made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service.  Given
8884 the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
8885 readable information about the support status.  This perl code
8886 demonstrate how to do it:</p>
8887
8888 <p><pre>
8889 use strict;
8890 use warnings;
8891 use SOAP::Lite;
8892 use Data::Dumper;
8893 my $GUID = '11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111';
8894 my $App = 'test';
8895 my $servicetag = $ARGV[0] or die "Please supply a servicetag. $!\n";
8896 my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
8897 my $s = SOAP::Lite
8898     -> uri('http://support.dell.com/WebServices/')
8899     -> on_action( sub { join '', @_ } )
8900     -> proxy('http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx')
8901     ;
8902 my $a = $s->GetAssetInformation(
8903     SOAP::Data->name('guid')->value($GUID)->type(''),
8904     SOAP::Data->name('applicationName')->value($App)->type(''),
8905     SOAP::Data->name('serviceTags')->value($servicetag)->type(''),
8906 );
8907 print Dumper($a -> result) ;
8908 </pre></p>
8909
8910 <p>The output can look like this:</p>
8911
8912 <p><pre>
8913 $VAR1 = {
8914           'Asset' => {
8915                      'Entitlements' => {
8916                                        'EntitlementData' => [
8917                                                             {
8918                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
8919                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
8920                                                               'Provider' => '',
8921                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
8922                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
8923                                                             },
8924                                                             {
8925                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
8926                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
8927                                                               'Provider' => '',
8928                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
8929                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
8930                                                             },
8931                                                             {
8932                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
8933                                                               'EndDate' => '2007-07-29T00:00:00',
8934                                                               'Provider' => '',
8935                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
8936                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
8937                                                             }
8938                                                           ]
8939                                      },
8940                      'AssetHeaderData' => {
8941                                           'SystemModel' => 'GX620',
8942                                           'ServiceTag' => '8DSGD2J',
8943                                           'SystemShipDate' => '2006-07-29T19:00:00-05:00',
8944                                           'Buid' => '2323',
8945                                           'Region' => 'Europe',
8946                                           'SystemID' => 'PLX_GX620',
8947                                           'SystemType' => 'OptiPlex'
8948                                         }
8949                    }
8950         };
8951 </pre></p>
8952
8953 <p>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
8954 service outside the
8955 <a href="http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation">inline
8956 documentation</a>, and according to
8957 <a href="http://iboyd.net/index.php/2012/02/14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/">one
8958 comment</a> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
8959 scraping HTML pages. :)</p>
8960
8961 <p>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service.  If
8962 you know of one, drop me an email. :)</p>
8963
8964       </div>
8965       <div class="tags">
8966
8967
8968         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
8969
8970
8971       </div>
8972     </div>
8973     <div class="padding"></div>
8974
8975     <div class="entry">
8976       <div class="title">
8977         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html">First monitor calibration using ColorHug</a>
8978       </div>
8979       <div class="date">
8980         31st May 2012
8981       </div>
8982       <div class="body">
8983         <p>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
8984 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">ColorHug</a> arrived in the
8985 mail, and I've had a few days to test it.  As all my machines are
8986 running Debian Squeeze, where
8987 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">the
8988 calibration software</a> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
8989 I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD.  This worked
8990 just fine.  So far I have only done the quick calibration.  It was
8991 slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
8992 another day.</p>
8993
8994 <p>After calibration, I get a
8995 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile">ICC color
8996 profile</a> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
8997 tools.  KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
8998 for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
8999 xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
9000 monitor setups.  But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
9001 attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
9002 monitor.  After searching a bit, I
9003 <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347896">discovered</a>
9004 that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
9005 and a simple</p>
9006
9007 <p><pre>
9008 dispwin -d 1 profile.icc
9009 </pre></p>
9010
9011 <p>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor.  The
9012 result was a bit more pink than I expected.  I guess I picked the
9013 wrong monitor type for the "led" monitor I got, but the result is good
9014 enough for now.</p>
9015
9016       </div>
9017       <div class="tags">
9018
9019
9020         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9021
9022
9023       </div>
9024     </div>
9025     <div class="padding"></div>
9026
9027     <div class="entry">
9028       <div class="title">
9029         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html">Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter</a>
9030       </div>
9031       <div class="date">
9032         27th May 2012
9033       </div>
9034       <div class="body">
9035         <p>In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
9036 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
9037 mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
9038 up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils.  His name was Ralf
9039 Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
9040 since then, helping to make sure the
9041 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
9042 Squeeze</a> release became as good as it is..</p>
9043
9044 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
9045
9046 <p>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
9047 Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12
9048 years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
9049 also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
9050 O- or A-level ("Abitur").  For quite as long, I've been taking care of
9051 our computer network.</p>
9052
9053 <p>Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
9054 spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
9055 (4 months).</p>
9056
9057 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
9058 project?</strong></p>
9059
9060 <p>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
9061 my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
9062 very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
9063 ("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
9064 to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
9065 months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
9066 (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others.  For more
9067 than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
9068 our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
9069 approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
9070 locally installed Skolelinux image.  As a consequence, I joined quite
9071 a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
9072 (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
9073 one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.</p>
9074
9075 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
9076 Edu?</strong></p>
9077
9078 <p>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
9079 project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
9080 the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
9081 computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
9082 free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
9083 up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
9084 labs).  Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
9085 administration costs tend towards zero.</p>
9086
9087 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
9088 Edu?</strong></p>
9089
9090 <p>While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
9091 might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
9092 budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
9093 supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
9094 office packages or desktop environments.  These schools have the
9095 option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
9096 capacity to do so.  Another issue is that Debian release cycles
9097 include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
9098 power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
9099 within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
9100 the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
9101 i.e. harder to understand for novices.</p>
9102
9103 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
9104
9105 <p>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
9106 KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
9107 PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)</p>
9108
9109 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
9110 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
9111
9112 <p><ol>
9113
9114 <li>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
9115 people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
9116 difference between proprietary software products, and free software
9117 developing.</li>
9118
9119 <li>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
9120 there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
9121 licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
9122 privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
9123 share among German Skolelinux schools.</li>
9124
9125 <li>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
9126 trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
9127 decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.</li>
9128
9129 <li>Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
9130 free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
9131 general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
9132 shared world wide (school books e.g.).</li>
9133
9134 <li>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
9135 office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't
9136 need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.</li>
9137
9138 <li>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.</li>
9139
9140 <li>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
9141 for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
9142 Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials.  And
9143 keep sending documents in ODF formats.</li>
9144
9145 </ol></p>
9146
9147       </div>
9148       <div class="tags">
9149
9150
9151         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
9152
9153
9154       </div>
9155     </div>
9156     <div class="padding"></div>
9157
9158     <div class="entry">
9159       <div class="title">
9160         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html">The cost of ODF and OOXML</a>
9161       </div>
9162       <div class="date">
9163         26th May 2012
9164       </div>
9165       <div class="body">
9166         <p>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
9167 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
9168 government.  I just sent him an email to let him know that his
9169 assumption are most likely wrong.  Sharing it here in case some of my
9170 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.</p>
9171
9172 <p><blockquote> <p>Hi.  I just noted your
9173 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/does-microsoft-office-lock-in-cost-the-uk-government-500-million/index.htm">http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/does-microsoft-office-lock-in-cost-the-uk-government-500-million/index.htm</a>
9174 comment:</p>
9175
9176 <p><blockquote>"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
9177 with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the
9178 savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the
9179 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take
9180 it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."
9181 </blockquote></p>
9182
9183 <p>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated.  I believe it is
9184 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
9185 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
9186 at the content.  In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
9187 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
9188 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
9189 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
9190 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
9191 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver.  In
9192 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
9193 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
9194 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
9195 of wasted effort.</p>
9196
9197 <p>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
9198 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
9199 minutes converting to ODF. :)</p>
9200
9201 <p>See
9202 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php</a>
9203 and
9204 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php</a>
9205 for background information.  Norwegian only, sorry. :)</p>
9206 </blockquote></p>
9207
9208       </div>
9209       <div class="tags">
9210
9211
9212         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
9213
9214
9215       </div>
9216     </div>
9217     <div class="padding"></div>
9218
9219     <div class="entry">
9220       <div class="title">
9221         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColorHug___USB_and_free_software_based_screen_color_calibration.html">ColorHug - USB and free software based screen color calibration</a>
9222       </div>
9223       <div class="date">
9224         18th May 2012
9225       </div>
9226       <div class="body">
9227         <p>In january, I
9228 <a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2012/01/17/colorhug-has-arrived/">discovered
9229 the ColorHug</a>, a USB dongle from
9230 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">Hughski</a> to calibrate
9231 the color on a computer screen.  The software required is
9232 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">included
9233 in Debian</a>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
9234 batch.  Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
9235 opportunity to order.  Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
9236 delivery.  I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
9237 should go in the mail on monday. :)</p>
9238
9239 <p>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
9240 colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
9241 drivers. :)</p>
9242
9243       </div>
9244       <div class="tags">
9245
9246
9247         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9248
9249
9250       </div>
9251     </div>
9252     <div class="padding"></div>
9253
9254     <div class="entry">
9255       <div class="title">
9256         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html">Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner</a>
9257       </div>
9258       <div class="date">
9259         13th May 2012
9260       </div>
9261       <div class="body">
9262         <p>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
9263 publish another interview with the people behind
9264 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
9265 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
9266 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
9267 details get right before release.
9268
9269 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
9270
9271 <p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
9272 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany.  I worked nearly 20 years as
9273 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
9274 international company for machinery and equipment.  Since 2011 I'm a
9275 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
9276 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer.  From April this year
9277 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
9278 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
9279
9280 <p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
9281 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
9282 home since 2006.</p>
9283
9284 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
9285 project?</strong></p>
9286
9287 <p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
9288 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
9289 middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
9290 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
9291 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
9292 computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>
9293
9294 <p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
9295 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
9296 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
9297 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
9298 and with a lot of fun.  About one year later the school was connected
9299 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
9300 building.  That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
9301 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
9302 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
9303 costs for things like licence and software.  So I searched for a
9304 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
9305 people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
9306 prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school.  I
9307 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
9308 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
9309 Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>
9310
9311 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
9312 Edu?</strong></p>
9313
9314 <p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
9315 for me as today.</p>
9316
9317 <p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
9318
9319 <p><ul>
9320
9321 <li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
9322 they had little money to spent for computers and software.</li>
9323
9324 <li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
9325 cost.</li>
9326
9327 <li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
9328 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
9329 clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
9330 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
9331 server</li>
9332
9333 <li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
9334 school.</li>
9335
9336 </ul></p>
9337
9338 <p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
9339 came up in this way:</p>
9340
9341 <p><ul>
9342
9343 <li>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
9344 now.</li>
9345
9346 <li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
9347 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
9348 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>
9349
9350 <li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
9351 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
9352 interfaces used in the past.</li>
9353
9354 <li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
9355 different needs.</li>
9356
9357 <li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>
9358
9359 <li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
9360 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
9361 is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>
9362
9363 <li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
9364 solved today by Debian Edu. </li>
9365
9366 </ul></p>
9367
9368 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
9369 Edu?</strong></p>
9370
9371 <p><ul>
9372
9373 <li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
9374 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
9375 whole municipality areas.</li>
9376
9377 <li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
9378 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
9379 politicians.</li>
9380
9381 <li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
9382
9383 </ul></p>
9384
9385 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
9386
9387 <p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
9388 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
9389 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
9390 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
9391 need from the KDE environment.  On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
9392 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>
9393
9394 <p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
9395 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
9396 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
9397 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
9398 and the whole family.  I probably forgot something.</p>
9399
9400 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
9401 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
9402
9403 <p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
9404 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
9405 countries and areas all over the world.</p>
9406
9407       </div>
9408       <div class="tags">
9409
9410
9411         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
9412
9413
9414       </div>
9415     </div>
9416     <div class="padding"></div>
9417
9418     <div class="entry">
9419       <div class="title">
9420         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cutting_it_short___and_picking_the_right_tool_for_the_job.html">Cutting it short - and picking the right tool for the job</a>
9421       </div>
9422       <div class="date">
9423         30th April 2012
9424       </div>
9425       <div class="body">
9426         <p><!-- IMG_5869.JPG -->
9427 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-1611.jpeg"></p>
9428
9429 <p>I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
9430 common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
9431 But the last ones have not really been up to the task.  My last
9432 cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
9433 time, and cutting my head took forever.  And the one before that did
9434 not work very well either.  We have looked for something better for a
9435 while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
9436 discovered that there are indeed better tools available.  But these
9437 are not marketed and sold to "regular consumers".  The hair saloons
9438 can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
9439 companies.  The models they sell, are very different from the ones
9440 available from Elkjøp and Lefdal.  The main difference is their
9441 efficiency.  It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40
9442 minutes required by my impotent Braun.  The hairdresser I visited had
9443 a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
9444 producer.  But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.</p>
9445
9446 <p>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it.  This was not
9447 straight forward.  The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
9448 did not want to sell anything to me.  But searching for the model on
9449 the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
9450 around NOK 4000,-.  This was a bit much.  We kept searching and
9451 finally found a Danish supplier
9452 <a href="http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html">selling
9453 it for around NOK 1800,-</a>.  We ordered one, and it arrived a few
9454 days ago.</p>
9455
9456 <p>The instructions said it had to charge for 8 hours when we started
9457 to use it, so we left it charging over night.  Normally it will only
9458 need one hour to charge.  The following evening we successfully tested
9459 it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
9460 cutter.  The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
9461 toys.</p>
9462
9463       </div>
9464       <div class="tags">
9465
9466
9467         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9468
9469
9470       </div>
9471     </div>
9472     <div class="padding"></div>
9473
9474     <div class="entry">
9475       <div class="title">
9476         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/HTC_One_X___Your_video___What_do_you_mean_.html">HTC One X - Your video?  What do you mean?</a>
9477       </div>
9478       <div class="date">
9479         26th April 2012
9480       </div>
9481       <div class="body">
9482         <p>In <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece">an
9483 article today</a> published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
9484 <a href="http://www.urke.com/eirik/">Eirik Helland Urke</a> reports
9485 that the video editor application included with
9486 <a href="http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs">HTC One
9487 X</a> have some quite surprising terms of use.  The article is mostly
9488 based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:
9489
9490 <p><blockquote>
9491 "<a href="http://twitter.com/urke/status/194062269724897280">Drøy
9492 brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
9493 kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.</a>"
9494 </blockquote></p>
9495
9496 <p>I quickly translated it to this English message:</p>
9497
9498 <p><blockquote>
9499 "Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
9500 commercially.  Although I can ONLY use them privately."
9501 </blockquote></p>
9502
9503 <p>I've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
9504 suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
9505 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">discovered
9506 with my Canon IXUS 130</a>.  The HTC One X specification specifies that
9507 the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
9508 video.  AMR is
9509 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues">Adaptive
9510 Multi-Rate audio codec</a> with patents which according to the
9511 Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
9512 <a href="http://www.voiceage.com/">VoiceAge</a>.  MP4 is
9513 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing">MPEG4 with
9514 H.264</a>, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
9515 with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/">MPEG-LA</a>.</p>
9516
9517 <p>I know why I prefer
9518 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and open
9519 standards</a> also for video.</p>
9520
9521       </div>
9522       <div class="tags">
9523
9524
9525         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
9526
9527
9528       </div>
9529     </div>
9530     <div class="padding"></div>
9531
9532     <div class="entry">
9533       <div class="title">
9534         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html">RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory</a>
9535       </div>
9536       <div class="date">
9537         19th April 2012
9538       </div>
9539       <div class="body">
9540         <p>Here in Norway, the
9541 <a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=339"> Ministry of
9542 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs</a> is behind
9543 a <a href="http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder">directory of
9544 standards</a> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
9545 government.  When the directory was created, the people behind it made
9546 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
9547 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
9548 to the government.  Free software and non-free software could compete
9549 on the same level.</p>
9550
9551 <p>But recently, some standards with RAND
9552 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing">Reasonable
9553 And Non-Discriminatory</a>) terms have made their way into the
9554 directory.  And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
9555 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
9556 implementing them.  The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
9557 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
9558 willing to pay will get a license.  Both sound great in theory.  In
9559 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
9560 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user.  By
9561 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
9562 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
9563 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
9564 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
9565 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
9566 to implement a standard when the income available is zero.  The result
9567 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
9568 implementing standards with RAND terms.</p>
9569
9570 <p>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
9571 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
9572 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory.  Because free
9573 software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
9574 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
9575 in Norway.  The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
9576 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
9577 attention to these issues in the future.</p>
9578
9579 <p>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
9580 from Simon Phipps
9581 (<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/11/rand-not-so-reasonable/">RAND:
9582 Not So Reasonable?</a>).</p>
9583
9584 <p>Update 2012-04-21: Just came across a
9585 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm">blog
9586 post from Glyn Moody</a> over at Computer World UK warning about the
9587 same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government.  I
9588 can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
9589 <a href="http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder">the
9590 hearing taking place at the moment</a> (respond before 2012-04-27).
9591 It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
9592 specifications with RAND terms.</p>
9593
9594       </div>
9595       <div class="tags">
9596
9597
9598         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
9599
9600
9601       </div>
9602     </div>
9603     <div class="padding"></div>
9604
9605     <div class="entry">
9606       <div class="title">
9607         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html">Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt</a>
9608       </div>
9609       <div class="date">
9610         15th April 2012
9611       </div>
9612       <div class="body">
9613         <p>Behind <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
9614 Skolelinux</a> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
9615 setting together all the pieces.  This time I present to you Andreas
9616 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
9617 years.  He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
9618 up in the recently released
9619 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
9620 Edu Squeeze</a> version.</p>
9621
9622 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
9623
9624 <p>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany.  After
9625 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
9626 Quantum Optics.  After that I worked some years in an optics company.
9627 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
9628 teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school.  I teach math, physics,
9629 information technology and science/technology.</p>
9630
9631 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
9632 project?</strong></p>
9633
9634 <p>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
9635 project because of my interest in education and Debian.  Within the
9636 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
9637 contributing.</p>
9638
9639 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
9640 Edu?</strong></p>
9641
9642 <p>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
9643 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
9644 Debian Project!</p>
9645
9646 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
9647 Edu?</strong></p>
9648
9649 <p>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
9650 downside, too.  In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
9651 setup, if you need or want that.  Further more, it is not easily
9652 possible to upgrade the system to a new release.  It takes much too
9653 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
9654 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
9655 rather small and often busy elsewhere.</p>
9656
9657 <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN">Debian LAN</a>
9658 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.</p>
9659
9660 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
9661
9662 <p>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
9663 on all my machines.  For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
9664 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing.  At school I
9665 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.</p>
9666
9667 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
9668 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
9669
9670 <p>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
9671 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
9672 politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader".  The school
9673 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
9674 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats.  Even
9675 free browsers do not work for the school administration.  Publishers
9676 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.</p>
9677
9678 <p>To change this, political work is very important.  Parts of the
9679 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
9680 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
9681 the system.  There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
9682 "Free/Open Standards".  I am not sure if all the involved parties have
9683 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
9684 fraction takes them seriously.  However it might slowly make free
9685 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.</p>
9686
9687       </div>
9688       <div class="tags">
9689
9690
9691         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
9692
9693
9694       </div>
9695     </div>
9696     <div class="padding"></div>
9697
9698     <div class="entry">
9699       <div class="title">
9700         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html">Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</a>
9701       </div>
9702       <div class="date">
9703          8th April 2012
9704       </div>
9705       <div class="body">
9706         <p>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
9707 like <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>,
9708 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
9709 contributor to the
9710 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
9711 Edu Squeeze release manual</a>.
9712
9713 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
9714
9715 <p>I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
9716 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.</p>
9717
9718 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
9719 project?</strong></p>
9720
9721 <p>I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user!  The only
9722 reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
9723 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
9724 they'd like a native English speaker to proofread...  So I did a sweep
9725 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
9726 "localisation".</p>
9727
9728 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
9729 Edu?</strong></p>
9730
9731 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
9732 Edu?</strong></p>
9733
9734 <p>These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it!  In fact I
9735 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
9736 education system.</p>
9737
9738 <p>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
9739 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
9740 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
9741 money on the latest hardware.</p>
9742
9743 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
9744
9745 <p>I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
9746 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
9747 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).</p>
9748
9749 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
9750 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
9751
9752 <p>Well, I don't know.  I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
9753 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
9754 you would hardly need a strategy.</p>
9755
9756       </div>
9757       <div class="tags">
9758
9759
9760         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
9761
9762
9763       </div>
9764     </div>
9765     <div class="padding"></div>
9766
9767     <div class="entry">
9768       <div class="title">
9769         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_the_KDE_menu_is_slow_when__usr__is_NFS_mounted___and_a_workaround.html">Why the KDE menu is slow when /usr/ is NFS mounted - and a workaround</a>
9770       </div>
9771       <div class="date">
9772          6th April 2012
9773       </div>
9774       <div class="body">
9775         <p>Recently I have spent time with
9776 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a> on speeding
9777 up a <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
9778 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
9779 process I discovered something very surprising.  The reason the KDE
9780 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
9781 due to the way KDE find application icons.  I discovered that showing
9782 the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
9783 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server.  Most of these were
9784
9785 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response.  Because the
9786 ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
9787 ms, the menus would be very slow.  Looking at the strace of kicker in
9788 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
9789 the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
9790 non-existing files.  KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
9791 one icon file.  In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
9792 around 230 access(2) calls.</p>
9793
9794 <p>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
9795 directories, and the list of possible directories is large.  In
9796 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
9797 and .xpm.  The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
9798 mounted.  Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
9799 requests.  I am not the first one to discover this.  I found a
9800 <a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416">KDE bug report
9801 from 2009</a> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.</p>
9802
9803 <p>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
9804 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
9805 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
9806 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
9807 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/.  Finally, I add symlinks to
9808 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
9809 for them.  This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
9810 one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
9811 almost instantaneous.  I'm not quite sure where to make the package
9812 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.</p>
9813
9814 <p>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
9815 and icon handling, but also the login process.  Not quite sure how to
9816 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
9817 that is not really an option at the moment.</p>
9818
9819 <p>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
9820 (at) lists.debian.org.</p>
9821
9822       </div>
9823       <div class="tags">
9824
9825
9826         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9827
9828
9829       </div>
9830     </div>
9831     <div class="padding"></div>
9832
9833     <div class="entry">
9834       <div class="title">
9835         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html">Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</a>
9836       </div>
9837       <div class="date">
9838          5th April 2012
9839       </div>
9840       <div class="body">
9841         <p>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
9842 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a> by
9843 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News.  The result was made public for
9844 non-subscribers today.  I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
9845 for schools.  Check out his article
9846 <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
9847 distribution for education</a> if you want to learn more.</p>
9848
9849       </div>
9850       <div class="tags">
9851
9852
9853         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9854
9855
9856       </div>
9857     </div>
9858     <div class="padding"></div>
9859
9860     <div class="entry">
9861       <div class="title">
9862         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html">Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</a>
9863       </div>
9864       <div class="date">
9865          1st April 2012
9866       </div>
9867       <div class="body">
9868         <p>Germany is a core area for the
9869 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
9870 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
9871 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
9872
9873 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
9874
9875 <p>I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
9876 Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
9877 "<a href="http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/">Westfalen-Kolleg
9878 Dortmund</a>", a second chance school.  Here, young adults is given
9879 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
9880 examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
9881 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
9882 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.</p>
9883
9884 <p>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
9885 blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
9886 information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
9887 teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
9888 school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
9889 the end of April this year.</p>
9890
9891 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
9892 project?</strong></p>
9893
9894 <p>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
9895 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
9896 Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
9897 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
9898 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
9899 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
9900 reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
9901 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
9902 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
9903 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
9904 Skolelinux.</p>
9905
9906 <p>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
9907 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
9908 clients.  The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
9909 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
9910 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
9911 the admin teachers.</p>
9912
9913 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
9914 Edu?</strong></p>
9915
9916 <p>It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
9917 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
9918 So it was a perfect choice.</p>
9919
9920 <p>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
9921 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
9922 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp.  It's of
9923 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
9924 a school and to choose where to get support for this.</p>
9925
9926 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
9927 Edu?</strong></p>
9928
9929 <p>Nothing yet.</p>
9930
9931 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
9932
9933 <p>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
9934 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
9935 Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
9936 LibreOffice.</p>
9937
9938 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
9939 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
9940
9941 <p>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
9942 that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
9943 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.</p>
9944
9945       </div>
9946       <div class="tags">
9947
9948
9949         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
9950
9951
9952       </div>
9953     </div>
9954     <div class="padding"></div>
9955
9956     <div class="entry">
9957       <div class="title">
9958         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Checking_email_with_kmail_using_Kerberos_authentication.html">Debian Edu screencast: Checking email with kmail using Kerberos authentication</a>
9959       </div>
9960       <div class="date">
9961         25th March 2012
9962       </div>
9963       <div class="body">
9964         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
9965
9966 <p>The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
9967 published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
9968 to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
9969 allowing users to check their local email account without providing
9970 any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
9971 and also available from <a href="https://vimeo.com/38601767">vimeo</a>
9972 and download as a
9973 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg
9974 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
9975
9976 <p><video id="kmail-kerberos-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
9977   <source src="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv" type='video/ogg; codecs="theora, vorbis"' />
9978     <p>Download video as
9979       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
9980 </video></p>
9981
9982       </div>
9983       <div class="tags">
9984
9985
9986         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9987
9988
9989       </div>
9990     </div>
9991     <div class="padding"></div>
9992
9993     <div class="entry">
9994       <div class="title">
9995         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html">Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby</a>
9996       </div>
9997       <div class="date">
9998         19th March 2012
9999       </div>
10000       <div class="body">
10001         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
10002 users are spread all across the globe.  The second inteview after
10003 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
10004 Squeeze release</a> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
10005 long time Linux user in United Kingdom.</p>
10006
10007 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
10008
10009 <p>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
10010 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
10011 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
10012 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
10013 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
10014 years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
10015 weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
10016 installations.</p>
10017
10018 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
10019 project?</strong></p>
10020
10021 <p>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
10022 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
10023 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
10024 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
10025 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
10026 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
10027 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
10028 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
10029 these things we decided to try it.</p>
10030
10031 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
10032 Edu?</strong></p>
10033
10034 <p>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
10035 from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
10036 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
10037 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
10038 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
10039 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
10040 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
10041 proprietary software everywhere.</p>
10042
10043 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
10044 Edu?</strong></p>
10045
10046 <p>As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
10047 how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
10048 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
10049 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
10050 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!</p>
10051
10052 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10053
10054 <p>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
10055 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
10056 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
10057 use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
10058 that counts...)</p>
10059
10060 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10061 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10062
10063 <p>That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
10064 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
10065 the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
10066 applications".  However, schools today are experiencing budget
10067 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
10068 XP.  At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
10069 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
10070 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
10071 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
10072 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
10073 first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.</p>
10074
10075 <p>I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
10076 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
10077 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.</p>
10078
10079       </div>
10080       <div class="tags">
10081
10082
10083         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
10084
10085
10086       </div>
10087     </div>
10088     <div class="padding"></div>
10089
10090     <div class="entry">
10091       <div class="title">
10092         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html">Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu</a>
10093       </div>
10094       <div class="date">
10095         16th March 2012
10096       </div>
10097       <div class="body">
10098         <p>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
10099 it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
10100 translated versions in sync.  To do this we have come up with what we
10101 believe is a very efficient work flow.</p>
10102
10103 <ol>
10104
10105 <li>The documentation is written in a
10106 <a href="http://moinmo.in">moinmoin wiki</a> (see for example
10107 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">the
10108 Squeeze release manual</a>) with support for exporting the content as
10109 docbook XML.</li>
10110
10111 <li>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
10112 .pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
10113 with the translated text.</li>
10114
10115 <li>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
10116 which part of the original wiki document is new or changed.  They can
10117 use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
10118 the translation.  There is even a system in place to handle translated
10119 images.</li>
10120
10121 <li>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
10122 XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.</li>
10123
10124 <li>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
10125 create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.</li>
10126
10127 </ol>
10128
10129 <p>This setup work very well, but have a few issues.  The biggest
10130 issue is that <a href="http://moinmo.in/DocBook">the docbook support
10131 we use in moinmoin</a> is not actively maintained.  The docbook
10132 support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
10133 make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.</p>
10134
10135 <p>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
10136 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc">debian-edu-doc
10137 package</a>.</p>
10138
10139       </div>
10140       <div class="tags">
10141
10142
10143         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10144
10145
10146       </div>
10147     </div>
10148     <div class="padding"></div>
10149
10150     <div class="entry">
10151       <div class="title">
10152         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!</a>
10153       </div>
10154       <div class="date">
10155         11th March 2012
10156       </div>
10157       <div class="body">
10158         <p>This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
10159 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> based
10160 on Debian/Squeeze.  The full announcement is
10161 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">available</a>
10162 from the project announcement list.  Now is a good time to test if it
10163 you have not done so already.</p>
10164
10165 <p>I plan to present the new version at
10166 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20120313-skolelinux/">a NUUG
10167 meeting</a> on tuesday.  I look forward to seeing you there if you are
10168 in Oslo, Norway.</p>
10169
10170       </div>
10171       <div class="tags">
10172
10173
10174         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10175
10176
10177       </div>
10178     </div>
10179     <div class="padding"></div>
10180
10181     <div class="entry">
10182       <div class="title">
10183         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html">Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker</a>
10184       </div>
10185       <div class="date">
10186          9th March 2012
10187       </div>
10188       <div class="body">
10189         <p>Inspired by <a href="http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/">the
10190 interview series</a> conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
10191 interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
10192 community.  This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
10193 more international audience.</p>
10194
10195 <p>While <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
10196 Skolelinux</a> originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
10197 Europe, there are users all around the globe.  One of those far away
10198 from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
10199 and contributor.  It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
10200 work out of the box in Japan.  I got him to answer a few questions,
10201 and am happy to share the response with you. :)
10202
10203
10204 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
10205
10206 <p>My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
10207 and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
10208 Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
10209 teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
10210 Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
10211 I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
10212 primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
10213 so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
10214 also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
10215 to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
10216 appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.</p>
10217
10218 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
10219 project?</strong></p>
10220
10221 <p>In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
10222 server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
10223 samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
10224 Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I
10225 did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server"
10226 and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading
10227 there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
10228 problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
10229 previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
10230 Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
10231 downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
10232 Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
10233 my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.</p>
10234
10235 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
10236 Edu?</strong></p>
10237
10238 <p>For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
10239 workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
10240 ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
10241 designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
10242 doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
10243 school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
10244 Japan.</p>
10245
10246 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
10247 Edu?</strong></p>
10248
10249 <p>The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
10250 have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
10251 make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
10252 who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
10253 important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
10254 instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
10255 default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
10256 kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
10257 Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is.  A
10258 second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
10259 customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
10260 multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It
10261 took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
10262 I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
10263 help.</p>
10264
10265 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10266
10267 <p>Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
10268 studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
10269 (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
10270 still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
10271 house, that's very useful for the family photos and music.  At school
10272 the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
10273 have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
10274 day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
10275 installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS.  We also
10276 have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
10277 and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.</p>
10278
10279 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10280 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10281
10282 <p>Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
10283 and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
10284 popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
10285 to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
10286 file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago.  The Edu aspect is
10287 also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
10288 Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu?  But of course the main attraction is
10289 budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
10290 compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
10291 is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
10292 are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser
10293 doesn't play flash, for example.</p>
10294
10295       </div>
10296       <div class="tags">
10297
10298
10299         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
10300
10301
10302       </div>
10303     </div>
10304     <div class="padding"></div>
10305
10306     <div class="entry">
10307       <div class="title">
10308         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Mass_creation_of_user_accounts_in_Squeeze.html">Debian Edu screencast: Mass creation of user accounts in Squeeze</a>
10309       </div>
10310       <div class="date">
10311          7th March 2012
10312       </div>
10313       <div class="body">
10314         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
10315
10316 <p>One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
10317 screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
10318 Debian Edu Squeeze.  The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
10319 also available from <a href="http://vimeo.com/37675399">vimeo</a> and
10320 download as a
10321 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg
10322 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
10323
10324 <p><video id="gosa-mass-user-create-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
10325   <source src="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv" type='video/ogg; codecs="theora, vorbis"' />
10326     <p>Download video as
10327       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
10328 </video></p>
10329
10330       </div>
10331       <div class="tags">
10332
10333
10334         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10335
10336
10337       </div>
10338     </div>
10339     <div class="padding"></div>
10340
10341     <div class="entry">
10342       <div class="title">
10343         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">Third release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
10344       </div>
10345       <div class="date">
10346          4th March 2012
10347       </div>
10348       <div class="body">
10349         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
10350 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
10351 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
10352 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00000.html">available</a>
10353 from the project announcement list.  Check it out if you
10354 need a software solution for your school.</p>
10355
10356       </div>
10357       <div class="tags">
10358
10359
10360         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10361
10362
10363       </div>
10364     </div>
10365     <div class="padding"></div>
10366
10367     <div class="entry">
10368       <div class="title">
10369         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Stopmotion_for_making_stop_motion_animations_on_Linux___reloaded.html">Stopmotion for making stop motion animations on Linux - reloaded</a>
10370       </div>
10371       <div class="date">
10372          3rd March 2012
10373       </div>
10374       <div class="body">
10375         <p>Many years ago, the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
10376 / Debian Edu project</a> initiated a student project to create a tool
10377 for making stop motion movies.  The proposal came from a teacher
10378 needing such tool on Skolelinux.  The project, called "stopmotion",
10379 was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
10380 national aware with this great project.  The project was initiated and
10381 mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
10382 and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad.  They got in touch with people at Aardman
10383 Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
10384 such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
10385 animators around the globe.  But as is usual after studying, both got
10386 jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
10387 project, and it has been lingering for a few years now.  Until last
10388 year...</p>
10389
10390 <p>Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
10391 project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
10392 name,
10393 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/">linuxstopmotion</a>.
10394 The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
10395 Internet search engines (try to search for 'stopmotion' to see what I
10396 mean). I've been following
10397 <a href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community">the
10398 mailing list</a> and the improvement already in place and planned for
10399 the future is encouraging.  If you want to make stop motion movies.
10400 Check it out. :)</p>
10401
10402       </div>
10403       <div class="tags">
10404
10405
10406         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
10407
10408
10409       </div>
10410     </div>
10411     <div class="padding"></div>
10412
10413     <div class="entry">
10414       <div class="title">
10415         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">Second release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
10416       </div>
10417       <div class="date">
10418         27th February 2012
10419       </div>
10420       <div class="body">
10421         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
10422 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
10423 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement did for some
10424 reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
10425 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/02/msg00015.html">available</a>
10426 from the Debian development announcement list.  Check it out if you
10427 need a software solution for your school.</p>
10428
10429       </div>
10430       <div class="tags">
10431
10432
10433         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10434
10435
10436       </div>
10437     </div>
10438     <div class="padding"></div>
10439
10440     <div class="entry">
10441       <div class="title">
10442         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">First release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
10443       </div>
10444       <div class="date">
10445         19th February 2012
10446       </div>
10447       <div class="body">
10448         <p>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
10449 wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
10450 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
10451 on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
10452 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00001.html">available</a>
10453 on the project announcement list.  Check it out if you need a software
10454 solution for your school.</p>
10455
10456       </div>
10457       <div class="tags">
10458
10459
10460         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10461
10462
10463       </div>
10464     </div>
10465     <div class="padding"></div>
10466
10467     <div class="entry">
10468       <div class="title">
10469         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_figure_out_which_RAID_disk_to_replace_when_it_fail.html">How to figure out which RAID disk to replace when it fail</a>
10470       </div>
10471       <div class="date">
10472         14th February 2012
10473       </div>
10474       <div class="body">
10475         <p>Once in a while my home server have disk problems.  Thanks to Linux
10476 Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
10477 <a href="http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/34532">I was
10478 close</a> this summer :).  But once a disk is starting to behave
10479 funny, a practical problem present itself.  How to get from the Linux
10480 device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
10481 the disk when the computer is turned off?  In my case I have SATA
10482 disks with a unique ID printed on the label.  All I need is a way to
10483 figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.</p>
10484
10485 <p>After fumbling a bit, I
10486 <a href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/">found
10487 that hdparm -I</a> will report the disk serial number, which is
10488 printed on the disk label.  The following (almost) one-liner can be
10489 used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:</p>
10490
10491 <blockquote><pre>
10492 for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep '(F)'|tr ' ' "\n"|grep '(F)'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
10493 do
10494     printf "Failed disk $d: "
10495     hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep 'Serial Num'
10496 done
10497 </blockquote></pre>
10498
10499 <p>Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
10500 next time, and in case other find it useful.</p>
10501
10502 <p>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(</p>
10503
10504 <blockquote><pre>
10505 Failed disk sdd1:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
10506 Failed disk sdd2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
10507 Failed disk sde2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1840589
10508 </blockquote></pre>
10509
10510 <p>The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
10511 labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
10512 to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
10513 remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label.  The vendor
10514 label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
10515 mounted inside my box.</p>
10516
10517 <p>I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
10518 Software RAID in the
10519 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html">nagios-plugins-standard</a>
10520 debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
10521 make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail.  At the moment
10522 it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
10523 should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
10524 disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.</p>
10525
10526       </div>
10527       <div class="tags">
10528
10529
10530         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid</a>.
10531
10532
10533       </div>
10534     </div>
10535     <div class="padding"></div>
10536
10537     <div class="entry">
10538       <div class="title">
10539         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
10540       </div>
10541       <div class="date">
10542         13th February 2012
10543       </div>
10544       <div class="body">
10545         <p>New in the Squeeze version of
10546 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is the
10547 ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
10548 based on their environment.  We want all systems on the client to use
10549 the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from <tt>http://wpad/wpad.dat</tt>, to
10550 allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
10551 sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings.  The schools can
10552 change the global proxy setting by editing
10553 <tt>tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat</tt> and the change propagate
10554 to all Debian Edu clients in the network.</p>
10555
10556 <p>The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
10557 In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
10558 simple one, they can run arbitrary code):</p>
10559
10560 <blockquote><pre>
10561 function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
10562 {
10563    if (!isResolvable(host) ||
10564        isPlainHostName(host) ||
10565        dnsDomainIs(host, ".intern"))
10566       return "DIRECT";
10567    else
10568       return "PROXY webcache:3128; DIRECT";
10569 }
10570 </pre></blockquote>
10571
10572 <p>to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:</p>
10573
10574 <blockquote><pre>
10575 http_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
10576 ftp_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
10577 </pre></blockquote>
10578
10579 <p>To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
10580 the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
10581 would be used for
10582 <tt><a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a></tt>,
10583 and insert this extracted proxy URL in <tt>/etc/environment</tt> and
10584 <tt>/etc/apt/apt.conf</tt>.  The perl script wpad-extract work just
10585 fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
10586 javascript code is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/631045">no longer
10587 able to build</a> because the C library it depended on is now a C++
10588 library.  I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
10589 is frozen.  An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
10590 use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
10591 known alternative is known at the moment.</p>
10592
10593 <p>This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
10594 laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
10595 is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
10596 automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
10597 feature when it is connected to other networks.  And if no proxy is
10598 announced, direct connections will be used instead.</p>
10599
10600 <p>Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
10601 or security problem.  But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
10602 could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
10603 and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
10604 distinction to be academic.  If you are afraid of using the wrong
10605 proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
10606 first place.  In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
10607 ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
10608 the network setup changes.</p>
10609
10610 <p>The WPAD system is documented in a
10611 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01">IETF
10612 draft</a> and a
10613 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol">Wikipedia
10614 page</a> for those that want to learn more.</p>
10615
10616       </div>
10617       <div class="tags">
10618
10619
10620         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10621
10622
10623       </div>
10624     </div>
10625     <div class="padding"></div>
10626
10627     <div class="entry">
10628       <div class="title">
10629         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Saving_power_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_using_shutdown_at_night.html">Saving power with Debian Edu / Skolelinux using shutdown-at-night</a>
10630       </div>
10631       <div class="date">
10632          5th February 2012
10633       </div>
10634       <div class="body">
10635         <p>Since the Lenny version of
10636 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, a
10637 feature to save power have been included.  It is as simple as it is
10638 practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
10639 in the morning.  This is done using the
10640 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html">shutdown-at-night</a> Debian package.</p>
10641
10642 <p>To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
10643 the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts.  For Debian Edu, this is done in
10644 LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
10645 every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and
10646 shut it down if it is.  If the hardware in question is supported by
10647 the
10648 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html">nvram-wakeup</a>
10649 package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +-
10650 10 minutes.  If this isn't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
10651 try to turn on the client.  The wake-on-lan option is only documented
10652 and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.</p>
10653
10654 <p>It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
10655 blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
10656 the common setup for a classroom.  The nvram-wakeup method only work
10657 for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock.  I've seen old
10658 machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
10659 starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot.  If you have one of
10660 those, you have to turn on the computer manually.</p>
10661
10662 <p>The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
10663 also be used outside the Debian Edu environment.  For those without a
10664 central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
10665 <tt>/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night</tt> to enable it.
10666 Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?</p>
10667
10668       </div>
10669       <div class="tags">
10670
10671
10672         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10673
10674
10675       </div>
10676     </div>
10677     <div class="padding"></div>
10678
10679     <div class="entry">
10680       <div class="title">
10681         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">Third beta version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
10682       </div>
10683       <div class="date">
10684          4th February 2012
10685       </div>
10686       <div class="body">
10687         <p>I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
10688 publish the third beta version of
10689 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
10690 on Squeeze.  If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
10691 out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
10692 installing new machines, check it out.  If you need a software
10693 solution for your school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
10694 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00000.html">available</a>
10695 on the project announcement list.</p>
10696
10697 <p>I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
10698 beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):</p>
10699
10700 <ul>
10701
10702 <li>It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
10703   10.0.0.0/8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
10704   the installation.</li>
10705
10706 <li>Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
10707   Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.</li>
10708
10709 <li>The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
10710   disabled queues are restarted every hour.  This should cut down on
10711   the amount of manual administration needed for printers.</li>
10712
10713 <li>The set of initial users have been changed.  Now a personal user
10714   for the local system administrator is created during installation
10715   instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
10716   and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
10717   membership.  This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
10718   up to date on the system.</li>
10719
10720 </ul>
10721
10722 <p>The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
10723 private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home.  I will use it look
10724 for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
10725 final Squeeze release is published.</p>
10726
10727 <p>Next weekend the project organise a
10728 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00001.html">developer
10729 gathering</a> in Oslo.  We will continue the work on the Squeeze
10730 version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version.  Perhaps I
10731 will see you there?</p>
10732
10733       </div>
10734       <div class="tags">
10735
10736
10737         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10738
10739
10740       </div>
10741     </div>
10742     <div class="padding"></div>
10743
10744     <div class="entry">
10745       <div class="title">
10746         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Handling_non_free_firmware_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html">Handling non-free firmware in Debian Edu/Squeeze</a>
10747       </div>
10748       <div class="date">
10749         27th January 2012
10750       </div>
10751       <div class="body">
10752         <p>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
10753 This is the sad fact of todays computers.  In the next version of
10754 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
10755 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
10756 firmware blobs easier to handle.  The common use case I run into is a
10757 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
10758 work, but there are other use cases as well.</p>
10759
10760 <p>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
10761 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
10762 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
10763 during installation.  This take care firmware for network devices used
10764 by the installer when installing from from local media.  But for
10765 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
10766 not taken care of by this.</p>
10767
10768 <p>For non-network devices, we provide the script
10769 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
10770 search through the <tt>dmesg</tt> output for drivers requesting extra
10771 firmware.  The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
10772 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
10773 the requested firmware file(s) is installed.  I have proposed to do
10774 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
10775 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">#655507</a>), to allow PXE
10776 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better.  Run the
10777 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
10778 firmware packages.</p>
10779
10780 <p>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
10781 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
10782 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
10783 included to be able to install at all.  To fill the PXE installation
10784 initrd with extra firmware, the
10785 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware</tt> script is
10786 provided.  Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
10787 PXE initrd with firmware packages.</p>
10788
10789 <p>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
10790 network cards working.  For this,
10791 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware</tt> is
10792 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs.  It is used
10793 the same way as the other firmware related tools.</p>
10794
10795 <p>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation.  We
10796 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
10797 non-free software, and it is their choice.</p>
10798
10799 <p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
10800 try.</p>
10801
10802       </div>
10803       <div class="tags">
10804
10805
10806         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10807
10808
10809       </div>
10810     </div>
10811     <div class="padding"></div>
10812
10813     <div class="entry">
10814       <div class="title">
10815         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Setting_up_a_new_school_with_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html">Setting up a new school with Debian Edu/Squeeze</a>
10816       </div>
10817       <div class="date">
10818         25th January 2012
10819       </div>
10820       <div class="body">
10821         <p>The next version of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu
10822 / Skolelinux</a> will include a new tool
10823 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp</tt>, which can be used to quickly set up all
10824 the computers in a school without much manual labour.  Here is a short
10825 summary on how to use it to set up a new school.</p>
10826
10827 <p>First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
10828 central server in the network.  Next, PXE boot all the client machines
10829 as thin clients and wait 5 minutes after the last client booted to
10830 allow the clients to report their existence to the central server.  When
10831 this is done, log on to the central server and run
10832 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a</tt> in the <tt>konsole</tt> to use the
10833 collected information to generate system objects in LDAP.  The output
10834 will look similar to this:</p>
10835
10836 <p><blockquote><pre>
10837 % sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
10838 info: Updating machine tjener.intern [10.0.2.2] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:05.
10839 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.
10840
10841 Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.
10842
10843 Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
10844 enter password: *******
10845 %
10846 </pre></blockquote></p>
10847
10848 <p>After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
10849 root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
10850 populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
10851 automatically generated names.  The final step to set up the school is
10852 then to log into <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa</a>,
10853 the web based user, group and system administration system to change
10854 system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
10855 enable DHCP and DNS for the systems.  All clients that should be used
10856 as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
10857 group.  After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
10858 and get their assigned names and group based configuration
10859 automatically.</p>
10860
10861 <p>We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
10862 enabled this weekend.  You might want to give it a try.</p>
10863
10864 <p>Update 2012-01-28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
10865 hosts, one need to add the option -a.  I forgot to mention this in my
10866 original text, and have added it to the text now.</p>
10867
10868       </div>
10869       <div class="tags">
10870
10871
10872         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
10873
10874
10875       </div>
10876     </div>
10877     <div class="padding"></div>
10878
10879     <div class="entry">
10880       <div class="title">
10881         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Changing_the_default_Iceweasel_start_page_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html">Changing the default Iceweasel start page in Debian Edu/Squeeze</a>
10882       </div>
10883       <div class="date">
10884         10th January 2012
10885       </div>
10886       <div class="body">
10887         <p>In the Squeeze version of
10888 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> soon
10889 to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
10890 start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
10891 all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP.  In
10892 addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
10893 are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
10894 first time.</p>
10895
10896 <p>The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
10897 labeledURI with "http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux" as the
10898 default content.  By changing this value to another URL, all users get
10899 to see the page behind this new URL.</p>
10900
10901 <p>An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool.  It can be
10902 called as "<tt>ldapvi -ZD '(cn=admin)'</tt>' to update LDAP with the
10903 new setting.</p>
10904
10905 <p>We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
10906 the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
10907 from within Iceweasel instead.</p>
10908
10909       </div>
10910       <div class="tags">
10911
10912
10913         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
10914
10915
10916       </div>
10917     </div>
10918     <div class="padding"></div>
10919
10920     <div class="entry">
10921       <div class="title">
10922         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">Second beta version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
10923       </div>
10924       <div class="date">
10925          7th January 2012
10926       </div>
10927       <div class="body">
10928         <p>I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
10929 the second beta version of
10930 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>.  If
10931 you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
10932 configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
10933 machines, check it out.  If you need a software solution for your
10934 school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
10935 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00000.html">available</a>
10936 on the project announcement list.</p>
10937
10938       </div>
10939       <div class="tags">
10940
10941
10942         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10943
10944
10945       </div>
10946     </div>
10947     <div class="padding"></div>
10948
10949     <div class="entry">
10950       <div class="title">
10951         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_an_hanging_debian_installer_for_Debian_Edu.html">Fixing an hanging debian installer for Debian Edu</a>
10952       </div>
10953       <div class="date">
10954          3rd January 2012
10955       </div>
10956       <div class="body">
10957         <p>During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
10958 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ready
10959 for release.  The initial problem I looked at was particularly
10960 interesting.</p>
10961
10962 <P>The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
10963 post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
10964 the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
10965 integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
10966 scratch.  I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
10967 remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
10968 wrap up its tasks.</p>
10969
10970 <p>Eventually the cause was found.  The kernel was simply running out
10971 of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
10972 Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
10973 to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
10974 because I was typing.</P>
10975
10976 <p>The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
10977 the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
10978 /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
10979 installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do 'find /' to
10980 generate some disk IO.  Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
10981 one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
10982 generate entropy.</p>
10983
10984 <p>The fix is in
10985 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation">beta1
10986 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze</a> version, and we
10987 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu">welcome more testers and
10988 developers</a>.  We plan to release beta2 this weekend.</p>
10989
10990       </div>
10991       <div class="tags">
10992
10993
10994         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10995
10996
10997       </div>
10998     </div>
10999     <div class="padding"></div>
11000
11001     <div class="entry">
11002       <div class="title">
11003         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
11004       </div>
11005       <div class="date">
11006         21st November 2011
11007       </div>
11008       <div class="body">
11009         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
11010 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
11011 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
11012 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
11013 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
11014 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
11015 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
11016 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
11017 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
11018 the tools to do so.</p>
11019
11020 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
11021 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
11022 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
11023 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
11024
11025 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
11026 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
11027 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
11028 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
11029 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
11030 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
11031 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
11032 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
11033
11034 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
11035 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
11036 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
11037
11038 <p><pre>
11039 #!/usr/bin/perl
11040 use strict;
11041 use warnings;
11042 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
11043 BEGIN {
11044     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
11045     my %rhelmodules = (
11046         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
11047         );
11048     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
11049         eval "use $module;";
11050         if ($@) {
11051             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
11052             system("yum install -y $pkg");
11053             eval "use $module;";
11054         }
11055     }
11056 }
11057 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
11058
11059 upgrade_dell();
11060
11061 exit 0;
11062
11063 sub run_firmware_script {
11064     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
11065     unless ($script) {
11066         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
11067         exit 1
11068     }
11069     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
11070
11071     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
11072         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
11073     } else {
11074         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
11075     }
11076 }
11077
11078 sub run_firmware_scripts {
11079     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
11080     # Run firmware packages
11081     for my $dir (@dirs) {
11082         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
11083         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
11084         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
11085             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
11086             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
11087         }
11088         closedir $dh;
11089     }
11090 }
11091
11092 sub download {
11093     my $url = shift;
11094     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
11095     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
11096 }
11097
11098 sub upgrade_dell {
11099     my @dirs;
11100     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
11101     chomp $product;
11102
11103     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
11104
11105         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
11106         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
11107
11108         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
11109             CLEANUP => 1
11110             );
11111         chdir($tmpdir);
11112         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
11113         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
11114         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
11115         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
11116         my $fwopts = "-q";
11117         if (@paths) {
11118             for my $url (@paths) {
11119                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
11120             }
11121             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
11122         } else {
11123             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
11124             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
11125         }
11126         chdir('/');
11127     } else {
11128         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
11129         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
11130     }
11131 }
11132
11133 sub fetch_dell_fw {
11134     my $path = shift;
11135     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
11136     download($url);
11137 }
11138
11139 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
11140 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
11141 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
11142 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
11143     my $filename = shift;
11144
11145     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
11146     chomp $product;
11147     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
11148
11149     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
11150
11151     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
11152     my @paths;
11153     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
11154         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
11155         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
11156         my $oscode;
11157         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
11158             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
11159         } else {
11160             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
11161         }
11162         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
11163         {
11164             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
11165         }
11166     }
11167     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
11168         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
11169
11170         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
11171         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
11172
11173         my $cpath = $component->{path};
11174         for my $path (@paths) {
11175             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
11176                 push(@paths, $cpath);
11177             }
11178         }
11179     }
11180     return @paths;
11181 }
11182 </pre>
11183
11184 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
11185 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
11186 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
11187 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
11188 outdated.</p>
11189
11190       </div>
11191       <div class="tags">
11192
11193
11194         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11195
11196
11197       </div>
11198     </div>
11199     <div class="padding"></div>
11200
11201     <div class="entry">
11202       <div class="title">
11203         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_e_book_kiosk_for_the_public_libraries_.html">Free e-book kiosk for the public libraries?</a>
11204       </div>
11205       <div class="date">
11206          7th October 2011
11207       </div>
11208       <div class="body">
11209         <p>Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
11210 publishing houses how to handle electronic books.  Surprisingly, the
11211 libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
11212 (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
11213 publishing houses.  Time limited renting (2-3 years) is one proposed
11214 model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
11215 Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
11216 models.</p>
11217
11218 <p>Anyway, while reading <a href="http://boklaben.no/?p=220">part of
11219 this debate</a>, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
11220 sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
11221 to a better model.  The idea is simple:</p>
11222
11223 <p>Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
11224 Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
11225 solution to hand out free e-books.  As a start, the books distributed
11226 by <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about
11227 36,000 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a>
11228 (1149 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The
11229 Internet Archive</a> (3,033,748 books) could be included, but any book
11230 where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
11231 distributed.</p>
11232
11233 <p>The computer system would make it easy to:</p>
11234
11235 <ul>
11236
11237 <li>Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
11238   other relevant equipment.</li>
11239
11240 <li>Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.</li>
11241
11242 </ul>
11243
11244 <p>In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
11245 site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
11246 visiting the library.  The site would be the distribution point for
11247 the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
11248 books available.</p>
11249
11250 <p>Are there anyone working on a system like this?  I guess it would
11251 fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
11252 libraries. :)</p>
11253
11254       </div>
11255       <div class="tags">
11256
11257
11258         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
11259
11260
11261       </div>
11262     </div>
11263     <div class="padding"></div>
11264
11265     <div class="entry">
11266       <div class="title">
11267         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage</a>
11268       </div>
11269       <div class="date">
11270         17th September 2011
11271       </div>
11272       <div class="body">
11273         <p>For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
11274 server.  It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
11275 movie collection easily available.  It also make it possible to let
11276 the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
11277 down.  I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
11278 subtitle options intact.  It also ensure that the entire film is one
11279 file on the disk.  As this is for personal use, the ripping is
11280 perfectly legal here in Norway.</p>
11281
11282 <p>Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:</p>
11283
11284 <blockquote><pre>
11285 #!/bin/sh
11286 # apt-get install lsdvd
11287 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
11288 dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=1M
11289 </pre></blockquote>
11290
11291 <p>But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
11292 been looking for a better alternative.  I have no idea why this I/O
11293 error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
11294 something fishy with the DVDs in question.  Or perhaps all three.</p>
11295
11296 <p>Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
11297 genisoimage.  This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
11298 movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
11299 back as an ISO.
11300
11301 <blockquote><pre>
11302 #!/bin/sh
11303 # apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
11304 set -e
11305 tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
11306 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
11307 dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
11308 genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
11309 rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
11310 </pre></blockquote>
11311
11312 <p>Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?</p>
11313
11314 <p>Update 2011-09-18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
11315 readom program from the wodim package.  It is specially written to
11316 read optical media, and is called like this: <tt>readom dev=/dev/dvd
11317 f=image.iso</tt>.  It got 6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
11318 before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.</p>
11319
11320 <p>Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
11321 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">his
11322 program python-dvdvideo</a>, which seem to be just what I am looking
11323 for.  Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
11324 creating a ISO image.  The git source built and installed just fine in
11325 Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.</p>
11326
11327       </div>
11328       <div class="tags">
11329
11330
11331         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
11332
11333
11334       </div>
11335     </div>
11336     <div class="padding"></div>
11337
11338     <div class="entry">
11339       <div class="title">
11340         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html">How is booting into runlevel 1 different from single user boots?</a>
11341       </div>
11342       <div class="date">
11343          4th August 2011
11344       </div>
11345       <div class="body">
11346         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
11347 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
11348 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
11349 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
11350 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
11351 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
11352 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
11353 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
11354 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
11355
11356 <p><blockquote>
11357 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
11358 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
11359 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
11360 </blockquote></p>
11361
11362 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
11363 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
11364 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
11365 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
11366 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
11367 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
11368 hard to explain.</p>
11369
11370 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
11371 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
11372 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
11373 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
11374 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
11375 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
11376 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
11377 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
11378 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
11379 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
11380 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
11381 mode).</p>
11382
11383 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
11384 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
11385 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
11386 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
11387 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
11388 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
11389 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
11390 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
11391 after visiting single user mode.</p>
11392
11393 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
11394 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
11395 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
11396 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
11397 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
11398 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
11399 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
11400 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
11401
11402 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
11403 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
11404 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
11405
11406       </div>
11407       <div class="tags">
11408
11409
11410         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11411
11412
11413       </div>
11414     </div>
11415     <div class="padding"></div>
11416
11417     <div class="entry">
11418       <div class="title">
11419         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">What should start from /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian? - almost nothing</a>
11420       </div>
11421       <div class="date">
11422         30th July 2011
11423       </div>
11424       <div class="body">
11425         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
11426 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
11427 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
11428 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
11429 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
11430 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
11431 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
11432 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
11433 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
11434 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
11435 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
11436 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
11437 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
11438
11439 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
11440 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
11441 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
11442 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
11443 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
11444 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
11445 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
11446 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
11447 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
11448
11449 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
11450 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
11451 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
11452 is presented.</p>
11453
11454 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
11455 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
11456 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
11457 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
11458 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
11459 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
11460 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
11461 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
11462 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
11463 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
11464 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
11465 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
11466 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
11467 find time to push this forward.</p>
11468
11469       </div>
11470       <div class="tags">
11471
11472
11473         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11474
11475
11476       </div>
11477     </div>
11478     <div class="padding"></div>
11479
11480     <div class="entry">
11481       <div class="title">
11482         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">What is missing in the Debian desktop, or why my parents use Kubuntu</a>
11483       </div>
11484       <div class="date">
11485         29th July 2011
11486       </div>
11487       <div class="body">
11488         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
11489 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
11490 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
11491 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
11492 issues.</p>
11493
11494 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
11495 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
11496 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
11497
11498 <ol>
11499
11500 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
11501 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
11502 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
11503 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
11504 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
11505 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
11506 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
11507 Debian.</li>
11508
11509 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
11510 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
11511 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
11512 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
11513 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
11514 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
11515 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
11516 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
11517 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
11518 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
11519 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
11520 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
11521 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
11522
11523 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
11524 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
11525 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
11526 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
11527 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
11528 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
11529 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
11530 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
11531 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
11532 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
11533
11534 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
11535 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
11536 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
11537 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
11538 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
11539 latter behaviour.</li>
11540
11541 </ol>
11542
11543 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
11544 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
11545 it do not matter much.</p>
11546
11547 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
11548 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
11549 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
11550
11551       </div>
11552       <div class="tags">
11553
11554
11555         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
11556
11557
11558       </div>
11559     </div>
11560     <div class="padding"></div>
11561
11562     <div class="entry">
11563       <div class="title">
11564         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html">Perl modules used by FixMyStreet which are missing in Debian/Squeeze</a>
11565       </div>
11566       <div class="date">
11567         26th July 2011
11568       </div>
11569       <div class="body">
11570         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
11571 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
11572 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
11573 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
11574 security support for a few years.</p>
11575
11576 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
11577 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
11578 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
11579 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
11580 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
11581 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
11582 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
11583 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
11584 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
11585 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
11586 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
11587 easier in the future.</p>
11588
11589 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
11590 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
11591 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
11592 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
11593 do not have time for.</p>
11594
11595       </div>
11596       <div class="tags">
11597
11598
11599         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>.
11600
11601
11602       </div>
11603     </div>
11604     <div class="padding"></div>
11605
11606     <div class="entry">
11607       <div class="title">
11608         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html">Free Software vs. proprietary softare...</a>
11609       </div>
11610       <div class="date">
11611         20th June 2011
11612       </div>
11613       <div class="body">
11614         <p>Reading
11615 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/06/20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/">the
11616 thingiverse blog</a>, I came across two highlights of interesting
11617 parts of the
11618 <a href="http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA">Autodesk</a>
11619 and
11620 <a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html">Microsoft
11621 Kinect</a> End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
11622 quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs.  Whenever I take
11623 the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.</p>
11624
11625       </div>
11626       <div class="tags">
11627
11628
11629         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
11630
11631
11632       </div>
11633     </div>
11634     <div class="padding"></div>
11635
11636     <div class="entry">
11637       <div class="title">
11638         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experimental_Open311_API_for_the_mySociety_fixmystreet_system.html">Experimental Open311 API for the mySociety fixmystreet system</a>
11639       </div>
11640       <div class="date">
11641         30th April 2011
11642       </div>
11643       <div class="body">
11644         <p>Today, the first draft implementation of an
11645 <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> for the Norwegian
11646 service <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> started to
11647 work.  It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
11648 have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
11649 platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
11650 able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
11651 requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
11652 I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
11653 that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.</p>
11654
11655 <p>Where is it?  Visit
11656 <a href="http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/">http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/</a>
11657 to have a look.  Please send feedback to the
11658 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
11659 (at) nuug.no</a> mailing list.</p>
11660
11661       </div>
11662       <div class="tags">
11663
11664
11665         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311</a>.
11666
11667
11668       </div>
11669     </div>
11670     <div class="padding"></div>
11671
11672     <div class="entry">
11673       <div class="title">
11674         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Initial_notes_on_adding_Open311_server_API_on_FixMyStreet.html">Initial notes on adding Open311 server API on FixMyStreet</a>
11675       </div>
11676       <div class="date">
11677         29th April 2011
11678       </div>
11679       <div class="body">
11680         <p>The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
11681 the <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> in the
11682 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">Norwegian FixMyStreet service</a>.
11683 Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
11684 reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
11685 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org.nz/">New Zealand version</a> of
11686 FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
11687 me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
11688 municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
11689 Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
11690 FixMyStreet.  The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
11691 to get a draft limping along.  In the process, I have discovered a few
11692 issues with the Open311 specification.</p>
11693
11694 <p>One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
11695 handling in the specification.  The specification seem to assume all
11696 reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
11697 receiving end to specify which languages are understood there.  To be
11698 able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
11699 it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
11700 I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
11701 of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
11702 submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
11703 Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
11704 methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
11705 know which language to use when writing a problem report.  I suspect
11706 some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.</p>
11707
11708 <p>A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
11709 which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet.  One issue I
11710 run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
11711 each category.  The specification do not state that the identifier
11712 should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
11713 here.  In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
11714 category.  As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
11715 as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
11716 it.</p>
11717
11718 <p>The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
11719 differ in a key part.  FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
11720 while Open311 only have a description and lack the title.  I'm not
11721 quite sure how to best handle this yet.  When asking for a FixMyStreet
11722 report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
11723 open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
11724 should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.</p>
11725
11726 <p>The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
11727 near a geographic location.  I believe this is important if one is to
11728 use Open311 as the query language for mobile units.  The specification
11729 should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
11730 and range= options.</p>
11731
11732 <p>The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
11733 several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
11734 to assume only one administration.  For FixMyStreet, this mean a
11735 report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
11736 available depend on the location of the problem.  Not quite sure how
11737 to best handle this.  I've noticed
11738 <a href="http://seeclickfix.com/open311/">SeeClickFix</a> added
11739 latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
11740 solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
11741 Will have to investigate this a bit more.</p>
11742
11743 <p>My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
11744 up with the open311 developer group.  I really wish they had a email
11745 list available via <a href="http://www.gmane.org/">Gmane</a> to use for
11746 discussions instead of only
11747 <a href="http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss">a forum<a/>.  Oh,
11748 well.  That will probably resolve itself, one way or another.  I've
11749 also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
11750 seem to reply to my questions there.  This make me wonder if I just
11751 fail to understand how the open311 community work.  It sure do not
11752 work like the free software project communities I am used to.</p>
11753
11754       </div>
11755       <div class="tags">
11756
11757
11758         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311</a>.
11759
11760
11761       </div>
11762     </div>
11763     <div class="padding"></div>
11764
11765     <div class="entry">
11766       <div class="title">
11767         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html">Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code 2011</a>
11768       </div>
11769       <div class="date">
11770          6th April 2011
11771       </div>
11772       <div class="body">
11773         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is still
11774 the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
11775 A few days ago the project
11776 <a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2011-04/msg00011.html">announced</a>
11777 that it will participate in Google Summer of Code.  I hope many
11778 students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
11779 into Gnash.</p>
11780
11781       </div>
11782       <div class="tags">
11783
11784
11785         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
11786
11787
11788       </div>
11789     </div>
11790     <div class="padding"></div>
11791
11792     <div class="entry">
11793       <div class="title">
11794         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html">A Norwegian FixMyStreet have kept me busy the last few weeks</a>
11795       </div>
11796       <div class="date">
11797          3rd April 2011
11798       </div>
11799       <div class="body">
11800         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
11801 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
11802 update in English.</p>
11803
11804 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
11805 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
11806 of the British service
11807 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
11808 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
11809 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
11810 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
11811 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
11812 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
11813 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
11814 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
11815 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
11816 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
11817 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
11818 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
11819 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
11820
11821 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
11822 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
11823 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
11824 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
11825 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
11826 public infrastructure.</p>
11827
11828 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
11829 such service?</p>
11830
11831       </div>
11832       <div class="tags">
11833
11834
11835         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>.
11836
11837
11838       </div>
11839     </div>
11840     <div class="padding"></div>
11841
11842     <div class="entry">
11843       <div class="title">
11844         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html">Using NVD and CPE to track CVEs in locally maintained software</a>
11845       </div>
11846       <div class="date">
11847         28th January 2011
11848       </div>
11849       <div class="body">
11850         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
11851 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
11852 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
11853 available on the Internet, and check our locally
11854 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
11855 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
11856 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
11857 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
11858 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
11859 out which security holes were present in our free software
11860 collection.</p>
11861
11862 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
11863 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
11864 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
11865 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
11866 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
11867 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
11868 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
11869 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
11870 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
11871 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
11872 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
11873 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
11874 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
11875 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
11876 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
11877 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
11878
11879 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
11880 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
11881 check out, one could look up
11882 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search?cpe=cpe%3A%2Fa%3Agnu%3Agzip:1.3.3">cpe:/a:gnu:gzip:1.3.3
11883 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
11884 The most recent one is
11885 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
11886 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
11887 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
11888
11889 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
11890 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
11891 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
11892 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
11893 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
11894 security issues out.</p>
11895
11896 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
11897 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
11898 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
11899 RHEL is providing
11900 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
11901 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
11902 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
11903
11904 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
11905 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
11906 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
11907 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
11908 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
11909 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
11910 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
11911 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
11912 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
11913 established soon.</p>
11914
11915 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
11916 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
11917 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
11918 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
11919 for their packages.</p>
11920
11921       </div>
11922       <div class="tags">
11923
11924
11925         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
11926
11927
11928       </div>
11929     </div>
11930     <div class="padding"></div>
11931
11932     <div class="entry">
11933       <div class="title">
11934         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html">Which module is loaded for a given PCI and USB device?</a>
11935       </div>
11936       <div class="date">
11937         23rd January 2011
11938       </div>
11939       <div class="body">
11940         <p>In the
11941 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
11942 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
11943 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
11944 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
11945 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
11946 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
11947 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
11948 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
11949 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
11950 one of my machines like this:</p>
11951
11952 <pre>
11953 loaded modules:
11954 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
11955 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
11956 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
11957 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
11958 10de:03ec pata_amd
11959 10de:03f6 sata_nv
11960 1022:1103 k8temp
11961 109e:036e bttv
11962 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
11963 11ab:4364 sky2
11964 </pre>
11965
11966 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
11967 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
11968
11969 <pre>
11970 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
11971     echo loaded pci modules:
11972     (
11973         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
11974         for address in * ; do
11975             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
11976                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
11977                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
11978                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
11979                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
11980                     echo "$id $module"
11981                 fi
11982             fi
11983         done
11984     )
11985     echo
11986 fi
11987 </pre>
11988
11989 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
11990 mappings:</p>
11991
11992 <pre>
11993 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
11994     echo loaded usb modules:
11995     (
11996         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
11997         for address in * ; do
11998             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
11999                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
12000                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
12001                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
12002                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
12003                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
12004                         echo "$id $module"
12005                     fi
12006                 fi
12007             fi
12008         done
12009     )
12010     echo
12011 fi
12012 </pre>
12013
12014 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
12015 well.</p>
12016
12017       </div>
12018       <div class="tags">
12019
12020
12021         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12022
12023
12024       </div>
12025     </div>
12026     <div class="padding"></div>
12027
12028     <div class="entry">
12029       <div class="title">
12030         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_video_format_most_supported_in_web_browsers_.html">The video format most supported in web browsers?</a>
12031       </div>
12032       <div class="date">
12033         16th January 2011
12034       </div>
12035       <div class="body">
12036         <p>The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
12037 contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H.264 and WebM.  Most video sites
12038 seem to use H.264, while others use Ogg Theora.  Interestingly enough,
12039 the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
12040 H.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
12041 the Wikipedia article on
12042 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">HTML5 video</a>,
12043 this is not true.  Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
12044 different browsers there.  The format supported by most browsers is
12045 Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
12046 Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
12047 BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
12048 The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
12049 Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
12050 Firefox.  H.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
12051 Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
12052 Explorer.  Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
12053 Safari can install plugins to get it.</p>
12054
12055 <p>To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
12056 without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
12057 HTML5 video tag.   Of course to reach all those without a browser
12058 handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms.  In
12059 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a>, we provide first fallback to a
12060 plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
12061 we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
12062 Theora.  This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an <a
12063 href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20110111-semantic-web/">example
12064 from last week</a>.</p>
12065
12066 <p>The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H.264 is
12067 the least supported is simple.  Implementing and using H.264
12068 require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
12069 are incompatible with free software licensing.  If you believed H.264
12070 was without royalties and license terms, check out
12071 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
12072 Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps.</p>
12073
12074 <p>A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
12075 available from
12076 <a href="http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos">the
12077 Xiph.org wiki</a>, if you want to have a look.  I'm not aware of a
12078 similar list for WebM nor H.264.</p>
12079
12080 <p>Update 2011-01-16 09:40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
12081 realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
12082 &lt;video&gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
12083 provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.</p>
12084
12085       </div>
12086       <div class="tags">
12087
12088
12089         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
12090
12091
12092       </div>
12093     </div>
12094     <div class="padding"></div>
12095
12096     <div class="entry">
12097       <div class="title">
12098         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Chrome_plan_to_drop_H_264_support_for_HTML5__lt_video_gt_.html">Chrome plan to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt;</a>
12099       </div>
12100       <div class="date">
12101         12th January 2011
12102       </div>
12103       <div class="body">
12104         <p>Today I discovered
12105 <a href="http://www.digi.no/860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome">via
12106 digi.no</a> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
12107 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html">yesterday
12108 announced</a> plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt; in
12109 the browser.  The argument used is that H.264 is not a "completely
12110 open" codec technology.  If you believe H.264 was free for everyone
12111 to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
12112 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
12113 Free That Matters</a>".  It is not free of cost for creators of video
12114 tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
12115 terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
12116 licensing the patents needed for H.264.  Some background information
12117 on the Google announcement is available from
12118 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome">OSnews</a>.
12119 A good read. :)</p>
12120
12121 <p>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
12122 promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
12123 the Internet.  This can only be done by publishing using free and open
12124 standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
12125 for these free and open standards.  At the moment there seem to be two
12126 camps in the web browser world when it come to video support.  Some
12127 browsers support H.264, and others support
12128 <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg Theora</a> and
12129 <a href="http://www.webmproject.org/">WebM</a>
12130 (<a href="http://www.diracvideo.org/">Dirac</a> is not really an option
12131 yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
12132 and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
12133 H.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
12134 Wikipedia keep <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">an
12135 updated summary</a> of the current browser support.</p>
12136
12137 <p>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
12138 promoting H.264, and John Gruber
12139 <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/simple_questions">presents
12140 the mind set</a> of these people quite well.  His rhetorical questions
12141 provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
12142 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24245/10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM">presenting
12143 the issues with H.264</a>. Both are worth a read.</p>
12144
12145 <p>Some argue that if Google is dropping H.264 because it isn't free,
12146 they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin.  This
12147 argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
12148 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm">todays
12149 blog post</a>, which I find to put the issue in context.  To me it
12150 make perfect sense to drop native H.264 support for HTML5 in the
12151 browser while still allowing plugins.</p>
12152
12153 <p>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
12154 is that all the users and promoters of H.264 suddenly get an uneasy
12155 feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse.  A lot of TV
12156 broadcasters have been moving to H.264 the last few years, and a lot
12157 of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
12158 could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
12159 publishing.  Suddenly this belief is shaken.</p>
12160
12161 <p>An interesting question is why Google is doing this.  While the
12162 presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
12163 present the argument if the change make sense from a business
12164 perspective.  One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
12165 with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
12166 feeling that dropping H.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
12167 Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
12168 Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
12169 to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
12170 video format not requiring royalties at all.  A third reason might be
12171 that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
12172 Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
12173 I guess time will tell.</p>
12174
12175 <p>Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided
12176 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html">more
12177 background and information on the move</a> it a blog post yesterday.</p>
12178
12179       </div>
12180       <div class="tags">
12181
12182
12183         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
12184
12185
12186       </div>
12187     </div>
12188     <div class="padding"></div>
12189
12190     <div class="entry">
12191       <div class="title">
12192         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_standards_are_Free_and_Open_as_defined_by_Digistan_.html">What standards are Free and Open as defined by Digistan?</a>
12193       </div>
12194       <div class="date">
12195         30th December 2010
12196       </div>
12197       <div class="body">
12198         <p>After trying to
12199 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">compare
12200 Ogg Theora</a> to
12201 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the Digistan
12202 definition</a> of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
12203 to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
12204 this.  As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
12205 the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
12206 JPEG, PNG, SVG and others.  But to be able to complete this in a
12207 reasonable time frame, I will need help.</p>
12208
12209 <p>If you want to help out with this work, please visit
12210 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse">the
12211 wiki pages I have set up for this</a>, and let me know that you want
12212 to help out.  The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
12213 place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
12214 NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
12215 of the Norwegian Unix User Group).</p>
12216
12217 <p>The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do.  Do not be
12218 scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)</p>
12219
12220       </div>
12221       <div class="tags">
12222
12223
12224         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
12225
12226
12227       </div>
12228     </div>
12229     <div class="padding"></div>
12230
12231     <div class="entry">
12232       <div class="title">
12233         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html">The many definitions of a open standard</a>
12234       </div>
12235       <div class="date">
12236         27th December 2010
12237       </div>
12238       <div class="body">
12239         <p>One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
12240 "<a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">Free and
12241 Open Standard</a>" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
12242 the term has been decided by Digistan.  The term "Open Standard" has
12243 become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
12244 about standards.  One end up discussing which definition is the best
12245 one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
12246 de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.</p>
12247
12248 <p>But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
12249 standards, here are a few that I know about.  This list is not
12250 complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
12251 complete survey.  More definitions are available on the
12252 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard">wikipedia
12253 page</a>.</p>
12254
12255 <p>First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
12256 Interoperability Framework version 1.0.  Really sad to notice that BSA
12257 and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version 2.0 of the
12258 framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
12259 their own people.  Anyway, the definition is still available and it
12260 include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
12261 specification on equal terms.</p>
12262
12263 <blockquote>
12264
12265 <p>The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
12266 and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
12267 open standard:</p>
12268
12269 <ul>
12270
12271 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
12272 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
12273 open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
12274 (consensus or majority decision etc.).</li>
12275
12276 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
12277 document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
12278 permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
12279 nominal fee.</li>
12280
12281 <li>The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
12282 (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
12283 free basis.</li>
12284
12285 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
12286
12287 </ul>
12288 </blockquote>
12289
12290 <p>Another one originates from my friends over at
12291 <a href="http://www.dkuug.dk/">DKUUG</a>, who coined and gathered
12292 support for <a href="http://www.aaben-standard.dk/">this
12293 definition</a> in 2004.  It even made it into the Danish parlament as
12294 <a href="http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm">their
12295 definition of a open standard</a>.  Another from a different part of
12296 the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.</p>
12297
12298 <blockquote>
12299
12300 <p>En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:</p>
12301
12302 <ol>
12303
12304 <li>Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
12305 tilgængelig.</li>
12306
12307 <li>Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
12308 begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.</li>
12309
12310 <li>Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
12311 "standardiseringsorganisation") via en åben proces.</li>
12312
12313 </ol>
12314
12315 </blockquote>
12316
12317 <p>Then there is <a href="http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html">the
12318 definition</a> from Free Software Foundation Europe.</p>
12319
12320 <blockquote>
12321
12322 <p>An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is</p>
12323
12324 <ol>
12325
12326 <li>subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
12327 manner equally available to all parties;</li>
12328
12329 <li>without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
12330 formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
12331 Standard themselves;</li>
12332
12333 <li>free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
12334 any party or in any business model;</li>
12335
12336 <li>managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
12337 in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
12338 parties;</li>
12339
12340 <li>available in multiple complete implementations by competing
12341 vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
12342 parties.</li>
12343
12344 </ol>
12345
12346 </blockquote>
12347
12348 <p>A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
12349 its
12350 <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%20Standard%20Definition.pdf">Open
12351 Standards Checklist</a> with a fairly detailed description.</p>
12352
12353 <blockquote>
12354 <p>Creation and Management of an Open Standard
12355
12356 <ul>
12357
12358 <li>Its development and management process must be collaborative and
12359   democratic:
12360
12361          <ul>
12362
12363          <li>Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
12364             participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
12365             imposed by the organization under which it is developed
12366             and managed.</li>
12367
12368          <li>The processes must be documented and, through a known
12369             method, can be changed through input from all
12370             participants.</li>
12371
12372          <li>The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
12373             the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.</li>
12374
12375          <li>Development and management should strive for consensus,
12376             and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.</li>
12377
12378          <li>The standard specification must be open to extensive
12379             public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
12380             comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.</li>
12381
12382          </ul>
12383
12384 </li>
12385
12386 </ul>
12387
12388 <p>Use and Licensing of an Open Standard</p>
12389 <ul>
12390
12391 <li>The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
12392   and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
12393   implementations to the interface described in the standard without
12394   undue or restrictive constraints.  Interfaces include APIs,
12395   protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.</li>
12396
12397 <li> The standard must not contain any proprietary "hooks" that create
12398   a technical or economic barriers</li>
12399
12400 <li>Faithful implementations of the standard must
12401   interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
12402   program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
12403   programs and mutually to use the information which has been
12404   exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
12405   file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
12406   conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
12407   computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
12408   intended to function.</li>
12409
12410 <li>It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
12411   standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
12412   must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.</li>
12413
12414 <li>It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
12415   fees; also known as "royalty free"), worldwide, non-exclusive and
12416   perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
12417   sell products based on the standard.  The only exceptions are
12418   terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
12419   outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
12420   patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
12421   only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
12422
12423       <ul>
12424
12425       <li> May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
12426         licensees' patent claims essential to practice that standard
12427         (also known as a reciprocity clause)</li>
12428
12429       <li> May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
12430         or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
12431         essential to practice that standard (also known as a
12432         "defensive suspension" clause)</li>
12433
12434       <li> The same licensing terms are available to every potential
12435         licensor</li>
12436
12437       </ul>
12438 </li>
12439
12440 <li>The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
12441   implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
12442   or restricted licensing terms</li>
12443
12444 </ul>
12445
12446 </blockquote>
12447
12448 <p>It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
12449 there are so many of them.  As you can see, the same holds true for
12450 open standard definitions.  Most of the definitions have a lot in
12451 common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
12452 standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
12453 possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
12454 competition to downplay the significance of open standards.  I hope we
12455 can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
12456 Standards.</p>
12457
12458       </div>
12459       <div class="tags">
12460
12461
12462         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
12463
12464
12465       </div>
12466     </div>
12467     <div class="padding"></div>
12468
12469     <div class="entry">
12470       <div class="title">
12471         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">Is Ogg Theora a free and open standard?</a>
12472       </div>
12473       <div class="date">
12474         25th December 2010
12475       </div>
12476       <div class="body">
12477         <p><a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">The
12478 Digistan definition</a> of a free and open standard reads like this:</p>
12479
12480 <blockquote>
12481
12482 <p>The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
12483 as follows:</p>
12484
12485 <ol>
12486
12487 <li>A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
12488 in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
12489 freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.</li>
12490
12491 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
12492 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
12493 open decision-making procedure available to all interested
12494 parties.</li>
12495
12496 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
12497 document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
12498 distribute, and use it freely.</li>
12499
12500 <li>The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
12501 irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.</li>
12502
12503 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
12504
12505 </ol>
12506
12507 <p>The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
12508 measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
12509 products based on the standard.</p>
12510 </blockquote>
12511
12512 <p>For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
12513 and open standard according to this definition.  Here is a short
12514 writeup of what I have been able to gather so far.  I brought up the
12515 topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
12516 <a href="http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/2009-July/001632.html">in
12517 July 2009</a>, for those that want to see some background information.
12518 According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
12519 the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.</p>
12520
12521 <p><strong>Free from vendor capture?</strong></p>
12522
12523 <p>As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
12524 Ogg Theora specification.  It can be argued that the
12525 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/">Xiph foundation</A> is such vendor, but
12526 given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
12527 making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
12528 obvious that this is a real risk.  One issue with the Xiph
12529 foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
12530 control the foundation) are not easily available on the web.  I've
12531 been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
12532 seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
12533 where is is spent in the foundation.  It is thus not obvious for an
12534 external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
12535 it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
12536 specification.  But it seem unlikely.</p>
12537
12538 <p><strong>Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?</strong></p>
12539
12540 <p>Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
12541 claim it to be, this point is fulfilled.  If Xiph foundation is
12542 controlled by a single vendor, it isn't, but I have not found any
12543 documentation indicating this.</p>
12544
12545 <p>According to
12546 <a href="http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf">a report</a>
12547 prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
12548 government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
12549 the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
12550 Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
12551 report is correct.</p>
12552
12553 <p><strong>Specification freely available?</strong></p>
12554
12555 <p>The specification for the <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/">Ogg
12556 container format</a> and both the
12557 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/">Vorbis</a> and
12558 <a href="http://theora.org/doc/">Theora</a> codeces are available on
12559 the web.  This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:
12560
12561 <blockquote>
12562
12563 Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
12564 specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
12565 capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
12566 the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
12567 specification compliance.
12568
12569 </blockquote>
12570
12571 <p>The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
12572 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt">RFC 3533</a>, and
12573 this is the term:<p>
12574
12575 <blockquote>
12576
12577 <p>This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
12578 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
12579 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
12580 distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
12581 provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
12582 included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
12583 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
12584 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
12585 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
12586 Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
12587 in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
12588 translate it into languages other than English.</p>
12589
12590 <p>The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
12591 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.</p>
12592 </blockquote>
12593
12594 <p>All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
12595 this term seem to be fulfilled.  There might be a problem with the
12596 missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
12597 thus reuse it in other specifications.  Not quite sure if that is a
12598 requirement for the Digistan definition.</p>
12599
12600 <p><strong>Royalty-free?</strong></p>
12601
12602 <p>There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
12603 Theora format.
12604 <a href="http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=65782">MPEG-LA</a>
12605 and
12606 <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit">Steve
12607 Jobs</a> in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
12608 patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
12609 them.  Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
12610 this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
12611 without paying any royalties.  For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
12612 Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H.264 codec
12613 than any real problem with Ogg Theora.</p>
12614
12615 <p><strong>No constraints on re-use?</strong></p>
12616
12617 <p>I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.</p>
12618
12619 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
12620
12621 <p>3 of 5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining 2
12622 depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation.  Given the
12623 background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
12624 safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
12625 would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
12626 this.</p>
12627
12628 <p>It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
12629 see if they are free and open standards.</p>
12630
12631       </div>
12632       <div class="tags">
12633
12634
12635         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
12636
12637
12638       </div>
12639     </div>
12640     <div class="padding"></div>
12641
12642     <div class="entry">
12643       <div class="title">
12644         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_reply_from_Edgar_Villanueva_to_Microsoft_in_Peru.html">The reply from Edgar Villanueva to Microsoft in Peru</a>
12645       </div>
12646       <div class="date">
12647         25th December 2010
12648       </div>
12649       <div class="body">
12650         <p>A few days ago
12651 <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece">an
12652 article</a> in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
12653 2.0 of
12654 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework">European
12655 Interoperability Framework</a> has been successfully lobbied by the
12656 proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
12657 Nothing very surprising there, given
12658 <a href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/29/2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe">earlier
12659 reports</a> on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
12660 this work.  But I find this very sad.   The definition of
12661 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-200506.txt">an
12662 open standard from version 1</a> was very good, and something I
12663 believe should be used also in the future, alongside
12664 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the
12665 definition from Digistan</A>.  Version 2 have removed the open
12666 standard definition from its content.</p>
12667
12668 <p>Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
12669 Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
12670 to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
12671 in the public sector in Peru.  As the text was not available from a
12672 few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
12673 <a href="http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html">my
12674 source</a> to ensure it is available also in the future.  Some
12675 background information about that story is available in
12676 <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6099">an article</a> from
12677 Linux Journal in 2002.</p>
12678
12679 <blockquote>
12680 <p>Lima, 8th of April, 2002<br>
12681 To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ<br>
12682 General Manager of Microsoft Perú</p>
12683
12684 <p>Dear Sir:</p>
12685
12686 <p>First of all, I thank you for your letter of March 25, 2002 in which you state the official position of Microsoft relative to Bill Number 1609, Free Software in Public Administration, which is indubitably inspired by the desire for Peru to find a suitable place in the global technological context. In the same spirit, and convinced that we will find the best solutions through an exchange of clear and open ideas, I will take this opportunity to reply to the commentaries included in your letter.</p>
12687
12688 <p>While acknowledging that opinions such as yours constitute a significant contribution, it would have been even more worthwhile for me if, rather than formulating objections of a general nature (which we will analyze in detail later) you had gathered solid arguments for the advantages that proprietary software could bring to the Peruvian State, and to its citizens in general, since this would have allowed a more enlightening exchange in respect of each of our positions.</p>
12689
12690 <p>With the aim of creating an orderly debate, we will assume that what you call "open source software" is what the Bill defines as "free software", since there exists software for which the source code is distributed together with the program, but which does not fall within the definition established by the Bill; and that what you call "commercial software" is what the Bill defines as "proprietary" or "unfree", given that there exists free software which is sold in the market for a price like any other good or service.</p>
12691
12692 <p>It is also necessary to make it clear that the aim of the Bill we are discussing is not directly related to the amount of direct savings that can by made by using free software in state institutions. That is in any case a marginal aggregate value, but in no way is it the chief focus of the Bill. The basic principles which inspire the Bill are linked to the basic guarantees of a state of law, such as:</p>
12693
12694 <p>
12695 <ul>
12696 <li>Free access to public information by the citizen. </li>
12697 <li>Permanence of public data. </li>
12698 <li>Security of the State and citizens.</li>
12699 </ul>
12700 </p>
12701
12702 <p>To guarantee the free access of citizens to public information, it is indispensable that the encoding of data is not tied to a single provider. The use of standard and open formats gives a guarantee of this free access, if necessary through the creation of compatible free software.</p>
12703
12704 <p>To guarantee the permanence of public data, it is necessary that the usability and maintenance of the software does not depend on the goodwill of the suppliers, or on the monopoly conditions imposed by them. For this reason the State needs systems the development of which can be guaranteed due to the availability of the source code.</p>
12705
12706 <p>To guarantee national security or the security of the State, it is indispensable to be able to rely on systems without elements which allow control from a distance or the undesired transmission of information to third parties. Systems with source code freely accessible to the public are required to allow their inspection by the State itself, by the citizens, and by a large number of independent experts throughout the world. Our proposal brings further security, since the knowledge of the source code will eliminate the growing number of programs with *spy code*. </p>
12707
12708 <p>In the same way, our proposal strengthens the security of the citizens, both in their role as legitimate owners of information managed by the state, and in their role as consumers. In this second case, by allowing the growth of a widespread availability of free software not containing *spy code* able to put at risk privacy and individual freedoms.</p>
12709
12710 <p>In this sense, the Bill is limited to establishing the conditions under which the state bodies will obtain software in the future, that is, in a way compatible with these basic principles.</p>
12711
12712
12713 <p>From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:<br>
12714 <li>the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software</li>
12715 <li>the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software</li>
12716 <li>the law does not specify which concrete software to use</li>
12717 <li>the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought</li>
12718 <li>the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.</li>
12719
12720 </p>
12721
12722 <p>What the Bill does express clearly, is that, for software to be acceptable for the state it is not enough that it is technically capable of fulfilling a task, but that further the contractual conditions must satisfy a series of requirements regarding the license, without which the State cannot guarantee the citizen adequate processing of his data, watching over its integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility throughout time, as these are very critical aspects for its normal functioning.</p>
12723
12724 <p>We agree, Mr. Gonzalez, that information and communication technology have a significant impact on the quality of life of the citizens (whether it be positive or negative). We surely also agree that the basic values I have pointed out above are fundamental in a democratic state like Peru. So we are very interested to know of any other way of guaranteeing these principles, other than through the use of free software in the terms defined by the Bill.</p>
12725
12726 <p>As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:</p>
12727
12728 <p>Firstly, you point out that: "1. The bill makes it compulsory for all public bodies to use only free software, that is to say open source software, which breaches the principles of equality before the law, that of non-discrimination and the right of free private enterprise, freedom of industry and of contract, protected by the constitution."</p>
12729
12730 <p>This understanding is in error. The Bill in no way affects the rights you list; it limits itself entirely to establishing conditions for the use of software on the part of state institutions, without in any way meddling in private sector transactions. It is a well established principle that the State does not enjoy the wide spectrum of contractual freedom of the private sector, as it is limited in its actions precisely by the requirement for transparency of public acts; and in this sense, the preservation of the greater common interest must prevail when legislating on the matter.</p>
12731
12732 <p>The Bill protects equality under the law, since no natural or legal person is excluded from the right of offering these goods to the State under the conditions defined in the Bill and without more limitations than those established by the Law of State Contracts and Purchasing (T.U.O. by Supreme Decree No. 012-2001-PCM).</p>
12733
12734 <p>The Bill does not introduce any discrimination whatever, since it only establishes *how* the goods have to be provided (which is a state power) and not *who* has to provide them (which would effectively be discriminatory, if restrictions based on national origin, race religion, ideology, sexual preference etc. were imposed). On the contrary, the Bill is decidedly antidiscriminatory. This is so because by defining with no room for doubt the conditions for the provision of software, it prevents state bodies from using software which has a license including discriminatory conditions.</p>
12735
12736 <p>It should be obvious from the preceding two paragraphs that the Bill does not harm free private enterprise, since the latter can always choose under what conditions it will produce software; some of these will be acceptable to the State, and others will not be since they contradict the guarantee of the basic principles listed above. This free initiative is of course compatible with the freedom of industry and freedom of contract (in the limited form in which the State can exercise the latter). Any private subject can produce software under the conditions which the State requires, or can refrain from doing so. Nobody is forced to adopt a model of production, but if they wish to provide software to the State, they must provide the mechanisms which guarantee the basic principles, and which are those described in the Bill.</p>
12737
12738 <p>By way of an example: nothing in the text of the Bill would prevent your company offering the State bodies an office "suite", under the conditions defined in the Bill and setting the price that you consider satisfactory. If you did not, it would not be due to restrictions imposed by the law, but to business decisions relative to the method of commercializing your products, decisions with which the State is not involved.</p>
12739
12740 <p>To continue; you note that:" 2. The bill, by making the use of open source software compulsory, would establish discriminatory and non competitive practices in the contracting and purchasing by public bodies..."</p>
12741
12742 <p>This statement is just a reiteration of the previous one, and so the response can be found above. However, let us concern ourselves for a moment with your comment regarding "non-competitive ... practices."</p>
12743
12744 <p>Of course, in defining any kind of purchase, the buyer sets conditions which relate to the proposed use of the good or service. From the start, this excludes certain manufacturers from the possibility of competing, but does not exclude them "a priori", but rather based on a series of principles determined by the autonomous will of the purchaser, and so the process takes place in conformance with the law. And in the Bill it is established that *no one* is excluded from competing as far as he guarantees the fulfillment of the basic principles.</p>
12745
12746 <p>Furthermore, the Bill *stimulates* competition, since it tends to generate a supply of software with better conditions of usability, and to better existing work, in a model of continuous improvement.</p>
12747
12748 <p>On the other hand, the central aspect of competivity is the chance to provide better choices to the consumer. Now, it is impossible to ignore the fact that marketing does not play a neutral role when the product is offered on the market (since accepting the opposite would lead one to suppose that firms' expenses in marketing lack any sense), and that therefore a significant expense under this heading can influence the decisions of the purchaser. This influence of marketing is in large measure reduced by the bill that we are backing, since the choice within the framework proposed is based on the *technical merits* of the product and not on the effort put into commercialization by the producer; in this sense, competitiveness is increased, since the smallest software producer can compete on equal terms with the most powerful corporations.</p>
12749
12750 <p>It is necessary to stress that there is no position more anti-competitive than that of the big software producers, which frequently abuse their dominant position, since in innumerable cases they propose as a solution to problems raised by users: "update your software to the new version" (at the user's expense, naturally); furthermore, it is common to find arbitrary cessation of technical help for products, which, in the provider's judgment alone, are "old"; and so, to receive any kind of technical assistance, the user finds himself forced to migrate to new versions (with non-trivial costs, especially as changes in hardware platform are often involved). And as the whole infrastructure is based on proprietary data formats, the user stays "trapped" in the need to continue using products from the same supplier, or to make the huge effort to change to another environment (probably also proprietary).</p>
12751
12752 <p>You add: "3. So, by compelling the State to favor a business model based entirely on open source, the bill would only discourage the local and international manufacturing companies, which are the ones which really undertake important expenditures, create a significant number of direct and indirect jobs, as well as contributing to the GNP, as opposed to a model of open source software which tends to have an ever weaker economic impact, since it mainly creates jobs in the service sector."</p>
12753
12754 <p>I do not agree with your statement. Partly because of what you yourself point out in paragraph 6 of your letter, regarding the relative weight of services in the context of software use. This contradiction alone would invalidate your position. The service model, adopted by a large number of companies in the software industry, is much larger in economic terms, and with a tendency to increase, than the licensing of programs.</p>
12755
12756 <p>On the other hand, the private sector of the economy has the widest possible freedom to choose the economic model which best suits its interests, even if this freedom of choice is often obscured subliminally by the disproportionate expenditure on marketing by the producers of proprietary software.</p>
12757
12758 <p>In addition, a reading of your opinion would lead to the conclusion that the State market is crucial and essential for the proprietary software industry, to such a point that the choice made by the State in this bill would completely eliminate the market for these firms. If that is true, we can deduce that the State must be subsidizing the proprietary software industry. In the unlikely event that this were true, the State would have the right to apply the subsidies in the area it considered of greatest social value; it is undeniable, in this improbable hypothesis, that if the State decided to subsidize software, it would have to do so choosing the free over the proprietary, considering its social effect and the rational use of taxpayers money.</p>
12759
12760 <p>In respect of the jobs generated by proprietary software in countries like ours, these mainly concern technical tasks of little aggregate value; at the local level, the technicians who provide support for proprietary software produced by transnational companies do not have the possibility of fixing bugs, not necessarily for lack of technical capability or of talent, but because they do not have access to the source code to fix it. With free software one creates more technically qualified employment and a framework of free competence where success is only tied to the ability to offer good technical support and quality of service, one stimulates the market, and one increases the shared fund of knowledge, opening up alternatives to generate services of greater total value and a higher quality level, to the benefit of all involved: producers, service organizations, and consumers.</p>
12761
12762 <p>It is a common phenomenon in developing countries that local software industries obtain the majority of their takings in the service sector, or in the creation of "ad hoc" software. Therefore, any negative impact that the application of the Bill might have in this sector will be more than compensated by a growth in demand for services (as long as these are carried out to high quality standards). If the transnational software companies decide not to compete under these new rules of the game, it is likely that they will undergo some decrease in takings in terms of payment for licenses; however, considering that these firms continue to allege that much of the software used by the State has been illegally copied, one can see that the impact will not be very serious. Certainly, in any case their fortune will be determined by market laws, changes in which cannot be avoided; many firms traditionally associated with proprietary software have already set out on the road (supported by copious expense) of providing services associated with free software, which shows that the models are not mutually exclusive.</p>
12763
12764 <p>With this bill the State is deciding that it needs to preserve certain fundamental values. And it is deciding this based on its sovereign power, without affecting any of the constitutional guarantees. If these values could be guaranteed without having to choose a particular economic model, the effects of the law would be even more beneficial. In any case, it should be clear that the State does not choose an economic model; if it happens that there only exists one economic model capable of providing software which provides the basic guarantee of these principles, this is because of historical circumstances, not because of an arbitrary choice of a given model.</p>
12765
12766 <p>Your letter continues: "4. The bill imposes the use of open source software without considering the dangers that this can bring from the point of view of security, guarantee, and possible violation of the intellectual property rights of third parties."</p>
12767
12768 <p>Alluding in an abstract way to "the dangers this can bring", without specifically mentioning a single one of these supposed dangers, shows at the least some lack of knowledge of the topic. So, allow me to enlighten you on these points.</p>
12769
12770 <p>On security:</p>
12771
12772 <p>National security has already been mentioned in general terms in the initial discussion of the basic principles of the bill. In more specific terms, relative to the security of the software itself, it is well known that all software (whether proprietary or free) contains errors or "bugs" (in programmers' slang). But it is also well known that the bugs in free software are fewer, and are fixed much more quickly, than in proprietary software. It is not in vain that numerous public bodies responsible for the IT security of state systems in developed countries require the use of free software for the same conditions of security and efficiency.</p>
12773
12774 <p>What is impossible to prove is that proprietary software is more secure than free, without the public and open inspection of the scientific community and users in general. This demonstration is impossible because the model of proprietary software itself prevents this analysis, so that any guarantee of security is based only on promises of good intentions (biased, by any reckoning) made by the producer itself, or its contractors.</p>
12775
12776 <p>It should be remembered that in many cases, the licensing conditions include Non-Disclosure clauses which prevent the user from publicly revealing security flaws found in the licensed proprietary product.</p>
12777
12778 <p>In respect of the guarantee:</p>
12779
12780 <p>As you know perfectly well, or could find out by reading the "End User License Agreement" of the products you license, in the great majority of cases the guarantees are limited to replacement of the storage medium in case of defects, but in no case is compensation given for direct or indirect damages, loss of profits, etc... If as a result of a security bug in one of your products, not fixed in time by yourselves, an attacker managed to compromise crucial State systems, what guarantees, reparations and compensation would your company make in accordance with your licensing conditions? The guarantees of proprietary software, inasmuch as programs are delivered ``AS IS'', that is, in the state in which they are, with no additional responsibility of the provider in respect of function, in no way differ from those normal with free software.</p>
12781
12782 <p>On Intellectual Property:</p>
12783
12784 <p>Questions of intellectual property fall outside the scope of this bill, since they are covered by specific other laws. The model of free software in no way implies ignorance of these laws, and in fact the great majority of free software is covered by copyright. In reality, the inclusion of this question in your observations shows your confusion in respect of the legal framework in which free software is developed. The inclusion of the intellectual property of others in works claimed as one's own is not a practice that has been noted in the free software community; whereas, unfortunately, it has been in the area of proprietary software. As an example, the condemnation by the Commercial Court of Nanterre, France, on 27th September 2001 of Microsoft Corp. to a penalty of 3 million francs in damages and interest, for violation of intellectual property (piracy, to use the unfortunate term that your firm commonly uses in its publicity).</p>
12785
12786 <p>You go on to say that: "The bill uses the concept of open source software incorrectly, since it does not necessarily imply that the software is free or of zero cost, and so arrives at mistaken conclusions regarding State savings, with no cost-benefit analysis to validate its position."</p>
12787
12788 <p>This observation is wrong; in principle, freedom and lack of cost are orthogonal concepts: there is software which is proprietary and charged for (for example, MS Office), software which is proprietary and free of charge (MS Internet Explorer), software which is free and charged for (Red Hat, SuSE etc GNU/Linux distributions), software which is free and not charged for (Apache, Open Office, Mozilla), and even software which can be licensed in a range of combinations (MySQL).</p>
12789
12790 <p>Certainly free software is not necessarily free of charge. And the text of the bill does not state that it has to be so, as you will have noted after reading it. The definitions included in the Bill state clearly *what* should be considered free software, at no point referring to freedom from charges. Although the possibility of savings in payments for proprietary software licenses are mentioned, the foundations of the bill clearly refer to the fundamental guarantees to be preserved and to the stimulus to local technological development. Given that a democratic State must support these principles, it has no other choice than to use software with publicly available source code, and to exchange information only in standard formats.</p>
12791
12792 <p>If the State does not use software with these characteristics, it will be weakening basic republican principles. Luckily, free software also implies lower total costs; however, even given the hypothesis (easily disproved) that it was more expensive than proprietary software, the simple existence of an effective free software tool for a particular IT function would oblige the State to use it; not by command of this Bill, but because of the basic principles we enumerated at the start, and which arise from the very essence of the lawful democratic State.</p>
12793
12794 <p>You continue: "6. It is wrong to think that Open Source Software is free of charge. Research by the Gartner Group (an important investigator of the technological market recognized at world level) has shown that the cost of purchase of software (operating system and applications) is only 8% of the total cost which firms and institutions take on for a rational and truly beneficial use of the technology. The other 92% consists of: installation costs, enabling, support, maintenance, administration, and down-time."</p>
12795
12796 <p>This argument repeats that already given in paragraph 5 and partly contradicts paragraph 3. For the sake of brevity we refer to the comments on those paragraphs. However, allow me to point out that your conclusion is logically false: even if according to Gartner Group the cost of software is on average only 8% of the total cost of use, this does not in any way deny the existence of software which is free of charge, that is, with a licensing cost of zero.</p>
12797
12798 <p>In addition, in this paragraph you correctly point out that the service components and losses due to down-time make up the largest part of the total cost of software use, which, as you will note, contradicts your statement regarding the small value of services suggested in paragraph 3. Now the use of free software contributes significantly to reduce the remaining life-cycle costs. This reduction in the costs of installation, support etc. can be noted in several areas: in the first place, the competitive service model of free software, support and maintenance for which can be freely contracted out to a range of suppliers competing on the grounds of quality and low cost. This is true for installation, enabling, and support, and in large part for maintenance. In the second place, due to the reproductive characteristics of the model, maintenance carried out for an application is easily replicable, without incurring large costs (that is, without paying more than once for the same thing) since modifications, if one wishes, can be incorporated in the common fund of knowledge. Thirdly, the huge costs caused by non-functioning software ("blue screens of death", malicious code such as virus, worms, and trojans, exceptions, general protection faults and other well-known problems) are reduced considerably by using more stable software; and it is well known that one of the most notable virtues of free software is its stability.</p>
12799
12800 <p>You further state that: "7. One of the arguments behind the bill is the supposed freedom from costs of open-source software, compared with the costs of commercial software, without taking into account the fact that there exist types of volume licensing which can be highly advantageous for the State, as has happened in other countries."</p>
12801
12802 <p>I have already pointed out that what is in question is not the cost of the software but the principles of freedom of information, accessibility, and security. These arguments have been covered extensively in the preceding paragraphs to which I would refer you.</p>
12803
12804 <p>On the other hand, there certainly exist types of volume licensing (although unfortunately proprietary software does not satisfy the basic principles). But as you correctly pointed out in the immediately preceding paragraph of your letter, they only manage to reduce the impact of a component which makes up no more than 8% of the total.</p>
12805
12806 <p>You continue: "8. In addition, the alternative adopted by the bill (I) is clearly more expensive, due to the high costs of software migration, and (II) puts at risk compatibility and interoperability of the IT platforms within the State, and between the State and the private sector, given the hundreds of versions of open source software on the market."</p>
12807
12808 <p>Let us analyze your statement in two parts. Your first argument, that migration implies high costs, is in reality an argument in favor of the Bill. Because the more time goes by, the more difficult migration to another technology will become; and at the same time, the security risks associated with proprietary software will continue to increase. In this way, the use of proprietary systems and formats will make the State ever more dependent on specific suppliers. Once a policy of using free software has been established (which certainly, does imply some cost) then on the contrary migration from one system to another becomes very simple, since all data is stored in open formats. On the other hand, migration to an open software context implies no more costs than migration between two different proprietary software contexts, which invalidates your argument completely.</p>
12809
12810 <p>The second argument refers to "problems in interoperability of the IT platforms within the State, and between the State and the private sector" This statement implies a certain lack of knowledge of the way in which free software is built, which does not maximize the dependence of the user on a particular platform, as normally happens in the realm of proprietary software. Even when there are multiple free software distributions, and numerous programs which can be used for the same function, interoperability is guaranteed as much by the use of standard formats, as required by the bill, as by the possibility of creating interoperable software given the availability of the source code.</p>
12811
12812 <p>You then say that: "9. The majority of open source code does not offer adequate levels of service nor the guarantee from recognized manufacturers of high productivity on the part of the users, which has led various public organizations to retract their decision to go with an open source software solution and to use commercial software in its place."</p>
12813
12814 <p>This observation is without foundation. In respect of the guarantee, your argument was rebutted in the response to paragraph 4. In respect of support services, it is possible to use free software without them (just as also happens with proprietary software), but anyone who does need them can obtain support separately, whether from local firms or from international corporations, again just as in the case of proprietary software.</p>
12815
12816 <p>On the other hand, it would contribute greatly to our analysis if you could inform us about free software projects *established* in public bodies which have already been abandoned in favor of proprietary software. We know of a good number of cases where the opposite has taken place, but not know of any where what you describe has taken place.</p>
12817
12818 <p>You continue by observing that: "10. The bill discourages the creativity of the Peruvian software industry, which invoices 40 million US$/year, exports 4 million US$ (10th in ranking among non-traditional exports, more than handicrafts) and is a source of highly qualified employment. With a law that encourages the use of open source, software programmers lose their intellectual property rights and their main source of payment."</p>
12819
12820 <p>It is clear enough that nobody is forced to commercialize their code as free software. The only thing to take into account is that if it is not free software, it cannot be sold to the public sector. This is not in any case the main market for the national software industry. We covered some questions referring to the influence of the Bill on the generation of employment which would be both highly technically qualified and in better conditions for competition above, so it seems unnecessary to insist on this point.</p>
12821
12822 <p>What follows in your statement is incorrect. On the one hand, no author of free software loses his intellectual property rights, unless he expressly wishes to place his work in the public domain. The free software movement has always been very respectful of intellectual property, and has generated widespread public recognition of its authors. Names like those of Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, Larry Wall, Miguel de Icaza, Andrew Tridgell, Theo de Raadt, Andrea Arcangeli, Bruce Perens, Darren Reed, Alan Cox, Eric Raymond, and many others, are recognized world-wide for their contributions to the development of software that is used today by millions of people throughout the world. On the other hand, to say that the rewards for authors rights make up the main source of payment of Peruvian programmers is in any case a guess, in particular since there is no proof to this effect, nor a demonstration of how the use of free software by the State would influence these payments.</p>
12823
12824 <p>You go on to say that: "11. Open source software, since it can be distributed without charge, does not allow the generation of income for its developers through exports. In this way, the multiplier effect of the sale of software to other countries is weakened, and so in turn is the growth of the industry, while Government rules ought on the contrary to stimulate local industry."</p>
12825
12826 <p>This statement shows once again complete ignorance of the mechanisms of and market for free software. It tries to claim that the market of sale of non- exclusive rights for use (sale of licenses) is the only possible one for the software industry, when you yourself pointed out several paragraphs above that it is not even the most important one. The incentives that the bill offers for the growth of a supply of better qualified professionals, together with the increase in experience that working on a large scale with free software within the State will bring for Peruvian technicians, will place them in a highly competitive position to offer their services abroad.</p>
12827
12828 <p>You then state that: "12. In the Forum, the use of open source software in education was discussed, without mentioning the complete collapse of this initiative in a country like Mexico, where precisely the State employees who founded the project now state that open source software did not make it possible to offer a learning experience to pupils in the schools, did not take into account the capability at a national level to give adequate support to the platform, and that the software did not and does not allow for the levels of platform integration that now exist in schools."</p>
12829
12830 <p>In fact Mexico has gone into reverse with the Red Escolar (Schools Network) project. This is due precisely to the fact that the driving forces behind the Mexican project used license costs as their main argument, instead of the other reasons specified in our project, which are far more essential. Because of this conceptual mistake, and as a result of the lack of effective support from the SEP (Secretary of State for Public Education), the assumption was made that to implant free software in schools it would be enough to drop their software budget and send them a CD ROM with Gnu/Linux instead. Of course this failed, and it couldn't have been otherwise, just as school laboratories fail when they use proprietary software and have no budget for implementation and maintenance. That's exactly why our bill is not limited to making the use of free software mandatory, but recognizes the need to create a viable migration plan, in which the State undertakes the technical transition in an orderly way in order to then enjoy the advantages of free software.</p>
12831
12832 <p>You end with a rhetorical question: "13. If open source software satisfies all the requirements of State bodies, why do you need a law to adopt it? Shouldn't it be the market which decides freely which products give most benefits or value?"</p>
12833
12834 <p>We agree that in the private sector of the economy, it must be the market that decides which products to use, and no state interference is permissible there. However, in the case of the public sector, the reasoning is not the same: as we have already established, the state archives, handles, and transmits information which does not belong to it, but which is entrusted to it by citizens, who have no alternative under the rule of law. As a counterpart to this legal requirement, the State must take extreme measures to safeguard the integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility of this information. The use of proprietary software raises serious doubts as to whether these requirements can be fulfilled, lacks conclusive evidence in this respect, and so is not suitable for use in the public sector.</p>
12835
12836 <p>The need for a law is based, firstly, on the realization of the fundamental principles listed above in the specific area of software; secondly, on the fact that the State is not an ideal homogeneous entity, but made up of multiple bodies with varying degrees of autonomy in decision making. Given that it is inappropriate to use proprietary software, the fact of establishing these rules in law will prevent the personal discretion of any state employee from putting at risk the information which belongs to citizens. And above all, because it constitutes an up-to-date reaffirmation in relation to the means of management and communication of information used today, it is based on the republican principle of openness to the public.</p>
12837
12838 <p>In conformance with this universally accepted principle, the citizen has the right to know all information held by the State and not covered by well- founded declarations of secrecy based on law. Now, software deals with information and is itself information. Information in a special form, capable of being interpreted by a machine in order to execute actions, but crucial information all the same because the citizen has a legitimate right to know, for example, how his vote is computed or his taxes calculated. And for that he must have free access to the source code and be able to prove to his satisfaction the programs used for electoral computations or calculation of his taxes.</p>
12839
12840 <p>I wish you the greatest respect, and would like to repeat that my office will always be open for you to expound your point of view to whatever level of detail you consider suitable.</p>
12841
12842 <p>Cordially,<br>
12843 DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ<br>
12844 Congressman of the Republic of Perú.</p>
12845 </blockquote>
12846
12847       </div>
12848       <div class="tags">
12849
12850
12851         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
12852
12853
12854       </div>
12855     </div>
12856     <div class="padding"></div>
12857
12858     <div class="entry">
12859       <div class="title">
12860         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html">Officeshots still going strong</a>
12861       </div>
12862       <div class="date">
12863         25th December 2010
12864       </div>
12865       <div class="body">
12866         <p>Half a year ago I
12867 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">wrote
12868 a bit</a> about <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>,
12869 a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
12870 the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.</p>
12871
12872 <p>I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
12873 Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
12874 different Office implementations handle different ODF features.  Sad
12875 to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
12876 LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
12877 for OfficeShots users yet).  I am glad to see that the ODF community
12878 got such a great test tool available.</p>
12879
12880       </div>
12881       <div class="tags">
12882
12883
12884         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
12885
12886
12887       </div>
12888     </div>
12889     <div class="padding"></div>
12890
12891     <div class="entry">
12892       <div class="title">
12893         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html">How to test if a laptop is working with Linux</a>
12894       </div>
12895       <div class="date">
12896         22nd December 2010
12897       </div>
12898       <div class="body">
12899         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
12900 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
12901 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
12902 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
12903 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
12904 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
12905 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
12906 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
12907 university.</p>
12908
12909 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
12910 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
12911 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
12912 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
12913 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
12914 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
12915 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
12916 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
12917
12918 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
12919 I perform on a new model.</p>
12920
12921 <ul>
12922
12923 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
12924 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
12925 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
12926
12927 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
12928 installation, X.org is working.</li>
12929
12930 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
12931 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
12932 reported by the program.</li>
12933
12934 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
12935 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
12936 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
12937 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
12938 normally test this by playing
12939 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
12940 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
12941
12942 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
12943 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
12944
12945 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
12946 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
12947
12948 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
12949 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
12950
12951 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
12952 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
12953 few.</li>
12954
12955 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
12956 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
12957 notice this.</li>
12958
12959 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
12960 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
12961 resume.</li>
12962
12963 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
12964 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
12965 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
12966 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
12967 not.</li>
12968
12969 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
12970 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
12971 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
12972 existence.</li>
12973
12974 </ul>
12975
12976 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
12977 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
12978 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
12979 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
12980 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
12981 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
12982 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
12983 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
12984
12985       </div>
12986       <div class="tags">
12987
12988
12989         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12990
12991
12992       </div>
12993     </div>
12994     <div class="padding"></div>
12995
12996     <div class="entry">
12997       <div class="title">
12998         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
12999       </div>
13000       <div class="date">
13001         11th December 2010
13002       </div>
13003       <div class="body">
13004         <p>As I continue to explore
13005 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
13006 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
13007 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
13008
13009 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
13010 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
13011 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
13012 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
13013 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
13014 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
13015 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
13016 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
13017 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
13018 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
13019 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
13020 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
13021 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
13022 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
13023 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
13024 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
13025 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
13026 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
13027 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
13028 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
13029
13030 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
13031 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
13032 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
13033 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
13034 If the Skolelinux foundation
13035 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
13036 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
13037 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
13038 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
13039 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
13040 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
13041 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
13042 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
13043
13044 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
13045 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
13046 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
13047 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
13048 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
13049 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
13050 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
13051 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
13052 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
13053 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
13054 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
13055 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
13056 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
13057 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
13058 currencies.</p>
13059
13060 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
13061 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
13062 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
13063 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
13064 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
13065 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
13066 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
13067 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
13068 BitCoins.  Check out
13069 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
13070 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
13071 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
13072 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
13073 yet.</p>
13074
13075 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
13076 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
13077 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
13078 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
13079 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
13080
13081       </div>
13082       <div class="tags">
13083
13084
13085         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
13086
13087
13088       </div>
13089     </div>
13090     <div class="padding"></div>
13091
13092     <div class="entry">
13093       <div class="title">
13094         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money</a>
13095       </div>
13096       <div class="date">
13097         10th December 2010
13098       </div>
13099       <div class="body">
13100         <p>With this weeks lawless
13101 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
13102 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
13103 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
13104 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
13105 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
13106 A blog post from
13107 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
13108 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
13109 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
13110 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
13111 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
13112 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
13113 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
13114
13115 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
13116 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
13117 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
13118 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
13119 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
13120 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
13121 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
13122 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
13123 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
13124 Debian</a> soon.</p>
13125
13126 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
13127 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
13128 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
13129 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
13130 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
13131 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
13132 you can even get
13133 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
13134 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
13135 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
13136 on the current exchange rates.</p>
13137
13138 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
13139 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
13140 donations to the address
13141 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
13142
13143       </div>
13144       <div class="tags">
13145
13146
13147         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
13148
13149
13150       </div>
13151     </div>
13152     <div class="padding"></div>
13153
13154     <div class="entry">
13155       <div class="title">
13156         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Student_group_continue_the_work_on_my_Reprap_3D_printer.html">Student group continue the work on my Reprap 3D printer</a>
13157       </div>
13158       <div class="date">
13159          9th December 2010
13160       </div>
13161       <div class="body">
13162         <p>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
13163 student assosiation <a href="http://www.robotica.no/">Robotica
13164 Osloensis</a> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
13165 get their own 3D printer.  They wanted to learn from me based on my
13166 work in the area.  After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
13167 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
13168 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon.  I look
13169 forward to see how this goes.  This monday their volunteer driver
13170 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
13171 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the 3D printer
13172 operational.</p>
13173
13174 <p>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
13175 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational.  I really look
13176 forward to being able to print all the cool 3D designs published on
13177 <a href="http://www.thingiverse.com/">Thingiverse</a>.  I even got
13178 some 3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
13179 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
13180 very cool 3D scanner.</p>
13181
13182       </div>
13183       <div class="tags">
13184
13185
13186         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap</a>.
13187
13188
13189       </div>
13190     </div>
13191     <div class="padding"></div>
13192
13193     <div class="entry">
13194       <div class="title">
13195         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_development_gathering_and_General_Assembly_for_FRiSK.html">Debian Edu development gathering and General Assembly for FRiSK</a>
13196       </div>
13197       <div class="date">
13198         29th November 2010
13199       </div>
13200       <div class="body">
13201         <p>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
13202 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2010-12-03-05-Oslo">development
13203 gathering</a> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway.  I
13204 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
13205 Squeeze release.  The gathering is open for everyone interested in
13206 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
13207
13208 <p>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
13209 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
13210 will hold its
13211 <a href="http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/2010">General Assembly
13212 for 2010</a>.  Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388
13213 people registered as members.  Last year 32 members cast their vote in
13214 the memberdb based election system.  I hope more people find time to
13215 vote this year.</p>
13216
13217       </div>
13218       <div class="tags">
13219
13220
13221         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
13222
13223
13224       </div>
13225     </div>
13226     <div class="padding"></div>
13227
13228     <div class="entry">
13229       <div class="title">
13230         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
13231       </div>
13232       <div class="date">
13233         27th November 2010
13234       </div>
13235       <div class="body">
13236         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
13237 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
13238 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
13239 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
13240 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
13241 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
13242 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
13243 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
13244
13245 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
13246 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
13247 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
13248 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
13249 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
13250 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
13251 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
13252 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
13253 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
13254 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
13255 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
13256
13257 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
13258 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
13259 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
13260 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
13261 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
13262 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
13263 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
13264 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
13265 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
13266 what is going on.</p>
13267
13268       </div>
13269       <div class="tags">
13270
13271
13272         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
13273
13274
13275       </div>
13276     </div>
13277     <div class="padding"></div>
13278
13279     <div class="entry">
13280       <div class="title">
13281         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades of the Gnome and KDE desktop, now with apt-get autoremove</a>
13282       </div>
13283       <div class="date">
13284         22nd November 2010
13285       </div>
13286       <div class="body">
13287         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
13288 upgrade testing of the
13289 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
13290 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
13291 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
13292 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
13293
13294 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
13295
13296 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
13297
13298 <blockquote><p>
13299   apache2.2-bin
13300   aptdaemon
13301   baobab
13302   binfmt-support
13303   browser-plugin-gnash
13304   cheese-common
13305   cli-common
13306   cups-pk-helper
13307   dmz-cursor-theme
13308   empathy
13309   empathy-common
13310   freedesktop-sound-theme
13311   freeglut3
13312   gconf-defaults-service
13313   gdm-themes
13314   gedit-plugins
13315   geoclue
13316   geoclue-hostip
13317   geoclue-localnet
13318   geoclue-manual
13319   geoclue-yahoo
13320   gnash
13321   gnash-common
13322   gnome
13323   gnome-backgrounds
13324   gnome-cards-data
13325   gnome-codec-install
13326   gnome-core
13327   gnome-desktop-environment
13328   gnome-disk-utility
13329   gnome-screenshot
13330   gnome-search-tool
13331   gnome-session-canberra
13332   gnome-system-log
13333   gnome-themes-extras
13334   gnome-themes-more
13335   gnome-user-share
13336   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
13337   gstreamer0.10-tools
13338   gtk2-engines
13339   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
13340   gtk2-engines-smooth
13341   hamster-applet
13342   libapache2-mod-dnssd
13343   libapr1
13344   libaprutil1
13345   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
13346   libaprutil1-ldap
13347   libart2.0-cil
13348   libboost-date-time1.42.0
13349   libboost-python1.42.0
13350   libboost-thread1.42.0
13351   libchamplain-0.4-0
13352   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
13353   libcheese-gtk18
13354   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
13355   libcryptui0
13356   libdiscid0
13357   libelf1
13358   libepc-1.0-2
13359   libepc-common
13360   libepc-ui-1.0-2
13361   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
13362   libfreerdp0
13363   libgconf2.0-cil
13364   libgdata-common
13365   libgdata7
13366   libgdu-gtk0
13367   libgee2
13368   libgeoclue0
13369   libgexiv2-0
13370   libgif4
13371   libglade2.0-cil
13372   libglib2.0-cil
13373   libgmime2.4-cil
13374   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
13375   libgnome2.24-cil
13376   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
13377   libgpod-common
13378   libgpod4
13379   libgtk2.0-cil
13380   libgtkglext1
13381   libgtksourceview2.0-common
13382   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
13383   libmono-addins0.2-cil
13384   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
13385   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
13386   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
13387   libmono-posix2.0-cil
13388   libmono-security2.0-cil
13389   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
13390   libmono-system2.0-cil
13391   libmtp8
13392   libmusicbrainz3-6
13393   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
13394   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
13395   libopal3.6.8
13396   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
13397   libpt2.6.7
13398   libpython2.6
13399   librpm1
13400   librpmio1
13401   libsdl1.2debian
13402   libsrtp0
13403   libssh-4
13404   libtelepathy-farsight0
13405   libtelepathy-glib0
13406   libtidy-0.99-0
13407   media-player-info
13408   mesa-utils
13409   mono-2.0-gac
13410   mono-gac
13411   mono-runtime
13412   nautilus-sendto
13413   nautilus-sendto-empathy
13414   p7zip-full
13415   pkg-config
13416   python-aptdaemon
13417   python-aptdaemon-gtk
13418   python-axiom
13419   python-beautifulsoup
13420   python-bugbuddy
13421   python-clientform
13422   python-coherence
13423   python-configobj
13424   python-crypto
13425   python-cupshelpers
13426   python-elementtree
13427   python-epsilon
13428   python-evolution
13429   python-feedparser
13430   python-gdata
13431   python-gdbm
13432   python-gst0.10
13433   python-gtkglext1
13434   python-gtksourceview2
13435   python-httplib2
13436   python-louie
13437   python-mako
13438   python-markupsafe
13439   python-mechanize
13440   python-nevow
13441   python-notify
13442   python-opengl
13443   python-openssl
13444   python-pam
13445   python-pkg-resources
13446   python-pyasn1
13447   python-pysqlite2
13448   python-rdflib
13449   python-serial
13450   python-tagpy
13451   python-twisted-bin
13452   python-twisted-conch
13453   python-twisted-core
13454   python-twisted-web
13455   python-utidylib
13456   python-webkit
13457   python-xdg
13458   python-zope.interface
13459   remmina
13460   remmina-plugin-data
13461   remmina-plugin-rdp
13462   remmina-plugin-vnc
13463   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
13464   rhythmbox-plugins
13465   rpm-common
13466   rpm2cpio
13467   seahorse-plugins
13468   shotwell
13469   software-center
13470   system-config-printer-udev
13471   telepathy-gabble
13472   telepathy-mission-control-5
13473   telepathy-salut
13474   tomboy
13475   totem
13476   totem-coherence
13477   totem-mozilla
13478   totem-plugins
13479   transmission-common
13480   xdg-user-dirs
13481   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
13482   xserver-xephyr
13483 </p></blockquote>
13484
13485 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
13486
13487 <blockquote><p>
13488   cheese
13489   ekiga
13490   eog
13491   epiphany-extensions
13492   evolution-exchange
13493   fast-user-switch-applet
13494   file-roller
13495   gcalctool
13496   gconf-editor
13497   gdm
13498   gedit
13499   gedit-common
13500   gnome-games
13501   gnome-games-data
13502   gnome-nettool
13503   gnome-system-tools
13504   gnome-themes
13505   gnuchess
13506   gucharmap
13507   guile-1.8-libs
13508   libavahi-ui0
13509   libdmx1
13510   libgalago3
13511   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
13512   libgtksourceview2.0-0
13513   liblircclient0
13514   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
13515   libspeexdsp1
13516   libsvga1
13517   rhythmbox
13518   seahorse
13519   sound-juicer
13520   system-config-printer
13521   totem-common
13522   transmission-gtk
13523   vinagre
13524   vino
13525 </p></blockquote>
13526
13527 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
13528
13529 <blockquote><p>
13530   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
13531 </p></blockquote>
13532
13533 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
13534
13535 <blockquote><p>
13536 [nothing]
13537 </p></blockquote>
13538
13539 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
13540
13541 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
13542
13543 <blockquote><p>
13544   ksmserver
13545 </p></blockquote>
13546
13547 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
13548
13549 <blockquote><p>
13550   kwin
13551   network-manager-kde
13552 </p></blockquote>
13553
13554 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
13555
13556 <blockquote><p>
13557   arts
13558   dolphin
13559   freespacenotifier
13560   google-gadgets-gst
13561   google-gadgets-xul
13562   kappfinder
13563   kcalc
13564   kcharselect
13565   kde-core
13566   kde-plasma-desktop
13567   kde-standard
13568   kde-window-manager
13569   kdeartwork
13570   kdeartwork-emoticons
13571   kdeartwork-style
13572   kdeartwork-theme-icon
13573   kdebase
13574   kdebase-apps
13575   kdebase-workspace
13576   kdebase-workspace-bin
13577   kdebase-workspace-data
13578   kdeeject
13579   kdelibs
13580   kdeplasma-addons
13581   kdeutils
13582   kdewallpapers
13583   kdf
13584   kfloppy
13585   kgpg
13586   khelpcenter4
13587   kinfocenter
13588   konq-plugins-l10n
13589   konqueror-nsplugins
13590   kscreensaver
13591   kscreensaver-xsavers
13592   ktimer
13593   kwrite
13594   libgle3
13595   libkde4-ruby1.8
13596   libkonq5
13597   libkonq5-templates
13598   libnetpbm10
13599   libplasma-ruby
13600   libplasma-ruby1.8
13601   libqt4-ruby1.8
13602   marble-data
13603   marble-plugins
13604   netpbm
13605   nuvola-icon-theme
13606   plasma-dataengines-workspace
13607   plasma-desktop
13608   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
13609   plasma-runners-addons
13610   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
13611   plasma-scriptengine-python
13612   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
13613   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
13614   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
13615   plasma-scriptengines
13616   plasma-wallpapers-addons
13617   plasma-widget-folderview
13618   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
13619   ruby
13620   sweeper
13621   update-notifier-kde
13622   xscreensaver-data-extra
13623   xscreensaver-gl
13624   xscreensaver-gl-extra
13625   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
13626 </p></blockquote>
13627
13628 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
13629
13630 <blockquote><p>
13631   ark
13632   google-gadgets-common
13633   google-gadgets-qt
13634   htdig
13635   kate
13636   kdebase-bin
13637   kdebase-data
13638   kdepasswd
13639   kfind
13640   klipper
13641   konq-plugins
13642   konqueror
13643   ksysguard
13644   ksysguardd
13645   libarchive1
13646   libcln6
13647   libeet1
13648   libeina-svn-06
13649   libggadget-1.0-0b
13650   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
13651   libgps19
13652   libkdecorations4
13653   libkephal4
13654   libkonq4
13655   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
13656   libkscreensaver5
13657   libksgrd4
13658   libksignalplotter4
13659   libkunitconversion4
13660   libkwineffects1a
13661   libmarblewidget4
13662   libntrack-qt4-1
13663   libntrack0
13664   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
13665   libplasmaclock4a
13666   libplasmagenericshell4
13667   libprocesscore4a
13668   libprocessui4a
13669   libqalculate5
13670   libqedje0a
13671   libqtruby4shared2
13672   libqzion0a
13673   libruby1.8
13674   libscim8c2a
13675   libsmokekdecore4-3
13676   libsmokekdeui4-3
13677   libsmokekfile3
13678   libsmokekhtml3
13679   libsmokekio3
13680   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
13681   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
13682   libsmokekparts3
13683   libsmokektexteditor3
13684   libsmokekutils3
13685   libsmokenepomuk3
13686   libsmokephonon3
13687   libsmokeplasma3
13688   libsmokeqtcore4-3
13689   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
13690   libsmokeqtgui4-3
13691   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
13692   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
13693   libsmokeqtscript4-3
13694   libsmokeqtsql4-3
13695   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
13696   libsmokeqttest4-3
13697   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
13698   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
13699   libsmokeqtxml4-3
13700   libsmokesolid3
13701   libsmokesoprano3
13702   libtaskmanager4a
13703   libtidy-0.99-0
13704   libweather-ion4a
13705   libxklavier16
13706   libxxf86misc1
13707   okteta
13708   oxygencursors
13709   plasma-dataengines-addons
13710   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
13711   plasma-widget-lancelot
13712   plasma-widgets-addons
13713   plasma-widgets-workspace
13714   polkit-kde-1
13715   ruby1.8
13716   systemsettings
13717   update-notifier-common
13718 </p></blockquote>
13719
13720 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
13721 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
13722 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
13723 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
13724
13725       </div>
13726       <div class="tags">
13727
13728
13729         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13730
13731
13732       </div>
13733     </div>
13734     <div class="padding"></div>
13735
13736     <div class="entry">
13737       <div class="title">
13738         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html">Migrating Xen virtual machines using LVM to KVM using disk images</a>
13739       </div>
13740       <div class="date">
13741         22nd November 2010
13742       </div>
13743       <div class="body">
13744         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
13745 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
13746 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
13747 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
13748 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
13749 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
13750 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
13751 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
13752 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
13753
13754 <p>I found
13755 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
13756 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
13757 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
13758 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
13759 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
13760 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
13761
13762 <pre>
13763 #!/bin/sh
13764
13765 # Based on
13766 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
13767
13768 set -e
13769 set -x
13770
13771 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
13772     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
13773     exit 1
13774 else
13775     host="$1"
13776 fi
13777
13778 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
13779     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
13780     exit 1
13781 fi
13782
13783 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
13784 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
13785 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
13786 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
13787
13788 img=$host.img
13789 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
13790 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
13791
13792 parted $img mklabel msdos
13793 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
13794 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
13795 parted $img set 1 boot on
13796
13797 modprobe dm-mod
13798 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
13799 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
13800
13801 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
13802 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
13803 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
13804
13805 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
13806 losetup -d /dev/loop0
13807 </pre>
13808
13809 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
13810 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
13811
13812 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
13813 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
13814 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
13815 seem to work just fine.</p>
13816
13817       </div>
13818       <div class="tags">
13819
13820
13821         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13822
13823
13824       </div>
13825     </div>
13826     <div class="padding"></div>
13827
13828     <div class="entry">
13829       <div class="title">
13830         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome and KDE desktop</a>
13831       </div>
13832       <div class="date">
13833         20th November 2010
13834       </div>
13835       <div class="body">
13836         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
13837 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
13838 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
13839 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
13840
13841 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
13842 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
13843 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
13844
13845 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
13846
13847 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
13848
13849 <blockquote><p>
13850   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
13851   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
13852   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
13853   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
13854   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
13855   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
13856   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
13857   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
13858   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
13859   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
13860   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
13861   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
13862   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
13863   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
13864   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
13865   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
13866   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
13867   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
13868   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
13869   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
13870   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
13871   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
13872   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
13873   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
13874   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
13875   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
13876   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
13877   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
13878   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
13879   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
13880   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
13881   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
13882   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
13883   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
13884   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
13885   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
13886   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
13887   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
13888   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
13889   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
13890   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
13891   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
13892   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
13893   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
13894   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
13895   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
13896   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
13897   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
13898   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
13899   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
13900   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
13901   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
13902   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
13903   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
13904   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
13905   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
13906   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
13907   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
13908   zip
13909 </p></blockquote>
13910
13911 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
13912
13913 <blockquote><p>
13914   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
13915   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
13916   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
13917   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
13918   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
13919   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
13920   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
13921   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
13922   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
13923   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
13924   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
13925   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
13926   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
13927   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
13928   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
13929   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
13930   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
13931   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
13932   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
13933   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
13934   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
13935   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
13936   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
13937   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
13938   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
13939   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
13940   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
13941   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
13942   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
13943 </p></blockquote>
13944
13945 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
13946
13947 <blockquote><p>
13948   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
13949 </p></blockquote>
13950
13951 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
13952
13953 <blockquote><p>
13954 [nothing]
13955 </p></blockquote>
13956
13957 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
13958
13959 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
13960
13961 <blockquote><p>
13962   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
13963   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
13964   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
13965   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
13966   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
13967   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
13968   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
13969   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
13970   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
13971   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
13972   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
13973   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
13974   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
13975   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
13976   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
13977   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
13978   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
13979   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
13980   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
13981   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
13982   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
13983   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
13984   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
13985   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
13986   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
13987   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
13988   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
13989   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
13990   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
13991   ttf-sazanami-gothic
13992 </p></blockquote>
13993
13994 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
13995
13996 <blockquote><p>
13997   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
13998   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
13999   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
14000   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
14001   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
14002   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
14003   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
14004   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
14005   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
14006   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
14007   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
14008   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
14009   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
14010   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
14011   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
14012   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
14013   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
14014   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
14015   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
14016   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
14017   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
14018   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
14019   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
14020   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
14021   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
14022   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
14023   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
14024   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
14025   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
14026   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
14027   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
14028   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
14029   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
14030 </p></blockquote>
14031
14032 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
14033
14034 <blockquote><p>
14035   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
14036   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
14037   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
14038   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
14039   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
14040   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
14041   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
14042 </p></blockquote>
14043
14044 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
14045
14046 <blockquote><p>
14047   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
14048 </p></blockquote>
14049
14050       </div>
14051       <div class="tags">
14052
14053
14054         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14055
14056
14057       </div>
14058     </div>
14059     <div class="padding"></div>
14060
14061     <div class="entry">
14062       <div class="title">
14063         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
14064       </div>
14065       <div class="date">
14066         20th November 2010
14067       </div>
14068       <div class="body">
14069         <p>Answering
14070 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
14071 call from the Gnash project</a> for
14072 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
14073 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
14074 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
14075 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
14076 releases out more often.</p>
14077
14078 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
14079 I have considered setting up a <a
14080 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
14081 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
14082 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
14083 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
14084 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
14085 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
14086 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
14087 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
14088 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
14089 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
14090 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
14091 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
14092
14093       </div>
14094       <div class="tags">
14095
14096
14097         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
14098
14099
14100       </div>
14101     </div>
14102     <div class="padding"></div>
14103
14104     <div class="entry">
14105       <div class="title">
14106         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
14107       </div>
14108       <div class="date">
14109          9th November 2010
14110       </div>
14111       <div class="body">
14112         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
14113
14114 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
14115 3D linked in from
14116 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
14117 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
14118
14119       </div>
14120       <div class="tags">
14121
14122
14123         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14124
14125
14126       </div>
14127     </div>
14128     <div class="padding"></div>
14129
14130     <div class="entry">
14131       <div class="title">
14132         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_room_on_the_Debian_Edu_Sqeeze_DVD.html">Making room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD</a>
14133       </div>
14134       <div class="date">
14135          7th November 2010
14136       </div>
14137       <div class="body">
14138         <p>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
14139 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> DVD, which is
14140 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
14141 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard.  Even
14142 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
14143 working using this DVD.</p>
14144
14145 <p>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
14146 installing recommended packages by default.  We want the same set of
14147 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
14148 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD.  I created
14149 a patch for debian-cd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/601203">BTS
14150 report #601203</a> to do this, and since this change was applied to
14151 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.</p>
14152
14153 <p>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
14154 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
14155 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
14156 Debian archive.</p>
14157
14158 <p>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
14159 were using most space.  A few large packages are well know;
14160 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont.  But I also
14161 discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
14162 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
14163 when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
14164 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
14165 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
14166 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
14167 documentation.  Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
14168 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
14169 free X driver should work.</p>
14170
14171 <p>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
14172 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
14173 DVD more useful again.</p>
14174
14175       </div>
14176       <div class="tags">
14177
14178
14179         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
14180
14181
14182       </div>
14183     </div>
14184     <div class="padding"></div>
14185
14186     <div class="entry">
14187       <div class="title">
14188         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
14189       </div>
14190       <div class="date">
14191         24th October 2010
14192       </div>
14193       <div class="body">
14194         <p>Some updates.</p>
14195
14196 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
14197 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
14198 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
14199 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
14200 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
14201 :)</p>
14202
14203 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
14204 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
14205 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
14206 It is called
14207 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
14208 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
14209 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
14210 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
14211 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
14212 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
14213
14214 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
14215 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
14216 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
14217 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
14218 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
14219 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
14220 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
14221 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
14222 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
14223 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
14224
14225       </div>
14226       <div class="tags">
14227
14228
14229         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
14230
14231
14232       </div>
14233     </div>
14234     <div class="padding"></div>
14235
14236     <div class="entry">
14237       <div class="title">
14238         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pledge_for_funding_to_the_Gnash_project_to_get_AVM2_support.html">Pledge for funding to the Gnash project to get AVM2 support</a>
14239       </div>
14240       <div class="date">
14241         19th October 2010
14242       </div>
14243       <div class="body">
14244         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is the
14245 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
14246 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
14247 funding has dried up.  I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
14248 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
14249 AVM2 flash files.</p>
14250
14251 <p>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
14252 <a href="http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">a pledge</a> with the
14253 following text:</P>
14254
14255 <p><blockquote>
14256
14257   <p>"I will pay 100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
14258   only if 10 other people will do the same."</p>
14259
14260   <p>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer</p>
14261
14262   <p>Deadline to sign up by: 24th December 2010</p>
14263
14264   <p>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
14265   format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
14266   web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
14267   format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
14268   days. The project web page is available from
14269   http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
14270   of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
14271   the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.</p>
14272
14273   <p>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
14274   time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
14275   to get this to happen.</p>
14276
14277   <p>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
14278   <a href="http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32</a> .</p>
14279
14280 </blockquote></p>
14281
14282 <p>I hope you will support this effort too.  I hope more than 10
14283 people will participate to make this happen.  The more money the
14284 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
14285 :)</p>
14286
14287       </div>
14288       <div class="tags">
14289
14290
14291         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
14292
14293
14294       </div>
14295     </div>
14296     <div class="padding"></div>
14297
14298     <div class="entry">
14299       <div class="title">
14300         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_version_of_a_Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot.html">First version of a Perl library to control the Spykee robot</a>
14301       </div>
14302       <div class="date">
14303          9th October 2010
14304       </div>
14305       <div class="body">
14306         <p>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
14307 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
14308 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
14309 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
14310 I've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
14311 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
14312 robots.</p>
14313
14314 <p>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
14315 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them.  There are
14316 a few less important features too.</p>
14317
14318 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
14319 but I never got around to releasing the current source.  I decided
14320 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
14321 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.</p>
14322
14323 <p>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
14324 published the source and deb.  If you got a spykee robot, grab the
14325 source or binary package:</p>
14326
14327 <p><ul>
14328 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian/packages/lenny/libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.tar.gz">libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.tar.gz</a></li>
14329 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian/packages/lenny/libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.dsc">libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.dsc</a></li>
14330 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian/packages/lenny/libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1_all.deb">libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1_all.deb</a></li>
14331 </ul></p>
14332
14333 <p>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
14334 please let me know.</p>
14335
14336       </div>
14337       <div class="tags">
14338
14339
14340         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
14341
14342
14343       </div>
14344     </div>
14345     <div class="padding"></div>
14346
14347     <div class="entry">
14348       <div class="title">
14349         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html">Links for 2010-10-03</a>
14350       </div>
14351       <div class="date">
14352          3rd October 2010
14353       </div>
14354       <div class="body">
14355         <p><ul>
14356
14357 <li><a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/09/there-is-no-plan-b-why-the-ipv4-to-ipv6-transition-will-be-ugly.ars">There
14358 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly</a></li>
14359
14360 <li>Scanner looking under clothes
14361 <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/10/03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/13667192/">has
14362 already been misused at Heathrow</a>.</li>
14363
14364 <li><a href="http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell">Landell
14365 Webcasting</a> - interesting alternative for
14366 <ahref="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">DVSwitch</a> with
14367 simple setup.
14368
14369 </ul></p>
14370
14371       </div>
14372       <div class="tags">
14373
14374
14375         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
14376
14377
14378       </div>
14379     </div>
14380     <div class="padding"></div>
14381
14382     <div class="entry">
14383       <div class="title">
14384         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">Terms of use for video produced by a Canon IXUS 130 digital camera</a>
14385       </div>
14386       <div class="date">
14387          9th September 2010
14388       </div>
14389       <div class="body">
14390         <p>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
14391 camera, a Canon IXUS 130.  It was instructive and very disturbing to
14392 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
14393 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
14394 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
14395 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway.  What is the
14396 problem, you might ask?  It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the
14397 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
14398 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
14399
14400 <p>On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
14401 written:</p>
14402
14403 <blockquote>
14404 <p>This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard
14405 and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding
14406 MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and
14407 non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the
14408 AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video.</p>
14409
14410 <p>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4
14411 standard.</p>
14412 </blockquote>
14413
14414 <p>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
14415 (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
14416 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
14417 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.</p>
14418
14419 <p>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
14420 read
14421 "<a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA">Why
14422 Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
14423 MPEG-LA</a>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
14424 "<a href="http://webmink.com/2010/09/03/h-264-and-foss/">H.264 Is Not
14425 The Sort Of Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
14426 the issue.  The solution is to support the
14427 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
14428 open standards</a> for video, like <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg
14429 Theora</a>, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.</p>
14430
14431       </div>
14432       <div class="tags">
14433
14434
14435         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
14436
14437
14438       </div>
14439     </div>
14440     <div class="padding"></div>
14441
14442     <div class="entry">
14443       <div class="title">
14444         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html">Some notes on Flash in Debian and Debian Edu</a>
14445       </div>
14446       <div class="date">
14447          4th September 2010
14448       </div>
14449       <div class="body">
14450         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
14451 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
14452 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
14453 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
14454 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
14455 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
14456 installed.</p>
14457
14458 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
14459 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
14460 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
14461 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
14462 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
14463 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
14464 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
14465 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
14466 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
14467
14468 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
14469 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
14470 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
14471 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
14472 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
14473 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
14474 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
14475 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
14476 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
14477 pages they want to visit.</p>
14478
14479 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
14480 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
14481 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
14482 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
14483 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
14484 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
14485 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
14486 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
14487 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
14488 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
14489 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
14490
14491       </div>
14492       <div class="tags">
14493
14494
14495         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
14496
14497
14498       </div>
14499     </div>
14500     <div class="padding"></div>
14501
14502     <div class="entry">
14503       <div class="title">
14504         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_first_perl_GUI_application___controlling_a_Spykee_robot.html">My first perl GUI application - controlling a Spykee robot</a>
14505       </div>
14506       <div class="date">
14507          1st September 2010
14508       </div>
14509       <div class="body">
14510         <p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
14511 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
14512 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
14513 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
14514 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
14515 allow me to drive the robot around.  I picked PerlQt as I have had
14516 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
14517 browsing the web for examples.  Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
14518 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
14519 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
14520 libqt-perl.  Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
14521 drive around.</p>
14522
14523 <p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
14524 controlling the robot.  Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
14525
14526 <p><pre>
14527 use Spykee;
14528 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
14529 my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
14530 my $spykee = Spykee->new();
14531 $spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
14532 $spykee->left();
14533 sleep 2;
14534 $spykee->right();
14535 sleep 2;
14536 $spykee->forward();
14537 sleep 2;
14538 $spykee->back();
14539 sleep 2;
14540 $spykee->stop();
14541 </pre></p>
14542
14543 <p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
14544 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
14545 implement the protocol used by the robot.  I've implemented several of
14546 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
14547 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote.  First I
14548 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
14549 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
14550 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
14551 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
14552 going. :).</p>
14553
14554 <p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
14555 where to make it available first.  I will add a link to
14556 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
14557 those that want to check back later to find it.</p>
14558
14559       </div>
14560       <div class="tags">
14561
14562
14563         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
14564
14565
14566       </div>
14567     </div>
14568     <div class="padding"></div>
14569
14570     <div class="entry">
14571       <div class="title">
14572         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken hard link handling with sshfs</a>
14573       </div>
14574       <div class="date">
14575         30th August 2010
14576       </div>
14577       <div class="body">
14578         <p>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
14579 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">previous
14580 post about sshfs</a>.  He reported another problem with sshfs.  It
14581 fail to handle hard links properly.  A simple way to spot this is to
14582 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree.  These should have
14583 a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1.  I just tested to see
14584 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:</p>
14585
14586 <pre>
14587 % ln foo bar
14588 ln: creating hard link `bar' => `foo': Function not implemented
14589 %
14590 </pre>
14591
14592 <p>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
14593 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
14594 avoid surprised unix programs.  Not as useful as working file locking
14595 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
14596 nevertheless. :)</p>
14597
14598 <p>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
14599 git from
14600 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a></p>
14601
14602       </div>
14603       <div class="tags">
14604
14605
14606         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
14607
14608
14609       </div>
14610     </div>
14611     <div class="padding"></div>
14612
14613     <div class="entry">
14614       <div class="title">
14615         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken umask handling with sshfs</a>
14616       </div>
14617       <div class="date">
14618         26th August 2010
14619       </div>
14620       <div class="body">
14621         <p>My file system sematics program
14622 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">presented
14623 a few days ago</a> is very useful to verify that a file system can
14624 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit.  I'm
14625 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
14626 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs.  My friend
14627 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
14628 Edu, but stopped because of problems.  I asked today what the problems
14629 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
14630 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
14631 script:</p>
14632
14633 <pre>
14634 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
14635   mode_t retval = 0;
14636   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
14637   if (-1 != fd) {
14638     unlink(name);
14639     struct stat statbuf;
14640     if (-1 != fstat(fd, &statbuf)) {
14641       retval = statbuf.st_mode & 0x1ff;
14642     }
14643     close(fd);
14644   }
14645   return retval;
14646 }
14647
14648 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
14649 int test_umask(void) {
14650   printf("info: testing umask effect on file creation\n");
14651
14652   mode_t orig_umask = umask(000);
14653   mode_t newmode;
14654   if (0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
14655     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 000\n",
14656            newmode);
14657   }
14658   umask(007);
14659   if (0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
14660     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 007\n",
14661            newmode);
14662   }
14663
14664   umask (orig_umask);
14665   return 0;
14666 }
14667
14668 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
14669   [...]
14670   test_umask();
14671   return 0;
14672 }
14673 </pre>
14674
14675 <p>Sure enough.  On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:</p>
14676
14677 <pre>
14678 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
14679 info: testing symlink creation
14680 info: testing subdirectory creation
14681 info: testing fcntl locking
14682   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
14683   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
14684   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
14685   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
14686   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
14687   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
14688 info: testing umask effect on file creation
14689 </pre>
14690
14691 <p>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
14692 result:</p>
14693
14694 <pre>
14695 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
14696 info: testing symlink creation
14697 info: testing subdirectory creation
14698 info: testing fcntl locking
14699   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
14700   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
14701   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
14702   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
14703   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
14704   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
14705 info: testing umask effect on file creation
14706   error: Wrong file mode 644 when creating using mode 666 and umask 000
14707   error: Wrong file mode 640 when creating using mode 666 and umask 007
14708 </pre>
14709
14710 <p>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
14711 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
14712 directory.</p>
14713
14714 <p>Update 2010-08-26: Reported the issue in
14715 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/594498">BTS report #594498</a></p>
14716
14717 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
14718 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
14719 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
14720
14721       </div>
14722       <div class="tags">
14723
14724
14725         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
14726
14727
14728       </div>
14729     </div>
14730     <div class="padding"></div>
14731
14732     <div class="entry">
14733       <div class="title">
14734         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html">Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent</a>
14735       </div>
14736       <div class="date">
14737         15th August 2010
14738       </div>
14739       <div class="body">
14740         <p>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
14741 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html">how
14742 to crush dissent</a> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
14743 well.  Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
14744 should go down.  In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
14745 long time.</p>
14746
14747       </div>
14748       <div class="tags">
14749
14750
14751         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
14752
14753
14754       </div>
14755     </div>
14756     <div class="padding"></div>
14757
14758     <div class="entry">
14759       <div class="title">
14760         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html">No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</a>
14761       </div>
14762       <div class="date">
14763          9th August 2010
14764       </div>
14765       <div class="body">
14766         <p>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
14767 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
14768 configuration settings on the clients.  I believe the work to be
14769 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
14770 generated configuration.</p>
14771
14772 <p>What is the point, you might ask?  The point is to allow a Debian
14773 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
14774 without any manual configuration.</p>
14775
14776 <p>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
14777 the University of Oslo using PXE.  With the PXE installation, I am
14778 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
14779 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
14780 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
14781 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret).  After answering
14782 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
14783 after around 50 minutes it is done.  I press enter to finish the
14784 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE.  When the machine is
14785 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
14786 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
14787 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
14788 same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop.  At no point during
14789 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
14790 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
14791 fetched via DHCP and DNS.  The roaming workstation is now ready for
14792 use.</p>
14793
14794 <p>How was this done, you might wonder?  First of all, here is the
14795 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
14796 working properly out of the box:</p>
14797
14798 <ul>
14799 <li>IP address/netmask and DNS server.</li>
14800 <li>Web proxy URL.</li>
14801 <li>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).</li>
14802 <li>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.</li>
14803 <li>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)</li>
14804 <li>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)</li>
14805 <li>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)</li>
14806 </ul>
14807
14808 <p>(Hm, did I forget anything?  Let me knew if I did.)</p>
14809
14810 <p>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
14811 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
14812 administrators to track their machines.  Since yesterday, everything
14813 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
14814 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.</p>
14815
14816 <p>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
14817 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
14818 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
14819 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
14820 /etc/apt/apt.conf.  I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
14821 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
14822 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
14823 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.</p>
14824
14825 <p>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
14826 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot.  First the
14827 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain.  If
14828 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead.  If an
14829 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
14830 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
14831 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS.  If there are several
14832 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
14833 LDAP subtree is used as the base.  If defaultNamingContext is missing,
14834 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
14835 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
14836 such an object is used as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
14837 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
14838 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record.  I've been unable to find a way to
14839 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
14840 current DNS domain is used.</p>
14841
14842 <p>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
14843 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
14844 found.  This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
14845 Oslo.  A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
14846 server, but have not been implemented yet.  I decided to fetch and
14847 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
14848 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
14849 log in nor the passwords required to log in.  Usernames and passwords
14850 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
14851 network, and will not change as the laptop move around.  For a
14852 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
14853 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much.  Perhaps we
14854 should switch those to use sssd too?</p>
14855
14856 <p>The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
14857 located when the user logs in for the first time.  The LDAP server is
14858 consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
14859 attribute is used if found.  If it isn't found, the home directory
14860 path fetched from NSS is used instead.  Assuming the path is of the
14861 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
14862 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
14863 smb://server.domain/username.  This algorithm works for both Debian
14864 edu and the University of Oslo.  Perhaps there are better attributes
14865 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
14866 do for now. :)</p>
14867
14868 <p>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
14869 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
14870 more flexible than before.  I suspect it will also work for thin
14871 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
14872 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
14873 yet.</p>
14874
14875 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
14876 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
14877
14878 <p>Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
14879 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
14880 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name.  Will have to
14881 implement it for Debian Edu. :)</p>
14882
14883       </div>
14884       <div class="tags">
14885
14886
14887         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
14888
14889
14890       </div>
14891     </div>
14892     <div class="padding"></div>
14893
14894     <div class="entry">
14895       <div class="title">
14896         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">Testing if a file system can be used for home directories...</a>
14897       </div>
14898       <div class="date">
14899          8th August 2010
14900       </div>
14901       <div class="body">
14902         <p>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
14903 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
14904 Edu/Skolelinux machines.  This was thought to be no problem, as the
14905 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
14906 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
14907 mount home directories without any problems.  But, after months of
14908 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.</p>
14909
14910 <p>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
14911 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
14912 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
14913 underlying file system is a unix file system.  When using a Windows
14914 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
14915 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
14916 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.</p>
14917
14918 <p>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
14919 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
14920 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
14921 it should.  If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
14922 help you find your way out again.  This is the fs-test.c source:</p>
14923
14924 <pre>
14925 /*
14926  * Some tests to check the file system sematics.  Used to verify that
14927  * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
14928  * directory.
14929  * License: GPL v2 or later
14930  *
14931  * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
14932  * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
14933 */
14934
14935 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
14936 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
14937 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1
14938
14939 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
14940
14941 #include &lt;errno.h>
14942 #include &lt;fcntl.h>
14943 #include &lt;stdio.h>
14944 #include &lt;string.h>
14945 #include &lt;stdlib.h>
14946 #include &lt;sys/file.h>
14947 #include &lt;sys/stat.h>
14948 #include &lt;sys/types.h>
14949 #include &lt;unistd.h>
14950
14951 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
14952 /*
14953  * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
14954  * package and linking with -lsqlite3.  A more low level test is
14955  * below.
14956  * See also &lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
14957  */
14958 #include &lt;sqlite3.h>
14959 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
14960   "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
14961 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
14962   char *zErrMsg;
14963   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
14964   sqlite3 *db=NULL;
14965   unlink(name);
14966   int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
14967   if( rc ){
14968     printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
14969     sqlite3_close(db);
14970     return -1;
14971   }
14972
14973   /* create tables */
14974   rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &zErrMsg);
14975   if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
14976     printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
14977     sqlite3_close(db);
14978     return -1;
14979   }
14980   printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
14981   sqlite3_close(db);
14982   return 0;
14983 }
14984 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
14985
14986 /*
14987  * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3.  This
14988  * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003.  This is
14989  * done in the sqlite3 library.
14990  * See also
14991  * &lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
14992  * POSIX specification
14993  * &lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
14994  */
14995 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
14996   struct flock fl;
14997   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
14998   unlink(name);
14999   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
15000   printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");
15001
15002   fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
15003   fl.l_pid    = getpid();
15004   printf("  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
15005   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
15006   fl.l_len    = 1;
15007   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
15008   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
15009
15010   printf("  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
15011   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
15012   fl.l_len    = 510;
15013   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
15014   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
15015
15016   printf("  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824");
15017   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
15018   fl.l_len    = 1;
15019   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
15020   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
15021
15022   printf("  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
15023   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
15024   fl.l_len    = 1;
15025   fl.l_type   = F_WRLCK;
15026   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
15027
15028   printf("  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
15029   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
15030   fl.l_len    = 510;
15031   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
15032
15033   printf("  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824");
15034   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
15035   fl.l_len    = 2;
15036   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
15037   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
15038
15039   close(fd);
15040   return 0;
15041 }
15042
15043 /*
15044  * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
15045  * below them.  This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
15046  * Mounting with option 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
15047  * slowing down file operations.
15048  */
15049 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
15050 #define LEVELS 5
15051   char *path = strdup("test");
15052   char *dirs[LEVELS];
15053   int level;
15054   printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
15055   for (level = 0; level &lt; LEVELS; level++) {
15056     char *newpath = NULL;
15057     if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
15058       printf("  error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
15059              path, strerror(errno));
15060       break;
15061     }
15062     asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
15063     free(path);
15064     path = newpath;
15065   }
15066   return 0;
15067 }
15068
15069 /*
15070  * Test if symlinks can be created.  This was a problem detected with
15071  * KDE.
15072  */
15073 int test_symlinks(void) {
15074   printf("info: testing symlink creation\n");
15075   unlink("symlink");
15076   if (-1 == symlink("file", "symlink"))
15077     printf("  error: Unable to create symlink\n");
15078   return 0;
15079 }
15080
15081 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
15082   printf("Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n");
15083   test_symlinks();
15084   test_subdirectory_creation();
15085 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
15086   test_sqlite_open();
15087 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
15088   test_gcompris_locking();
15089   return 0;
15090 }
15091 </pre>
15092
15093 <p>When everything is working, it should print something like
15094 this:</p>
15095
15096 <pre>
15097 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
15098 info: testing symlink creation
15099 info: testing subdirectory creation
15100 info: sqlite worked
15101 info: testing fcntl locking
15102   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
15103   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
15104   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
15105   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
15106   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
15107   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
15108 </pre>
15109
15110 <p>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
15111 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
15112 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
15113 the read-only lock (while Windows do not).  Another was a bug in the
15114 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
15115 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
15116 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
15117 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.</p>
15118
15119 <p>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
15120 it. :)</p>
15121
15122 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
15123 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
15124 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
15125
15126       </div>
15127       <div class="tags">
15128
15129
15130         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15131
15132
15133       </div>
15134     </div>
15135     <div class="padding"></div>
15136
15137     <div class="entry">
15138       <div class="title">
15139         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Autodetecting_Client_setup_for_roaming_workstations_in_Debian_Edu.html">Autodetecting Client setup for roaming workstations in Debian Edu</a>
15140       </div>
15141       <div class="date">
15142          7th August 2010
15143       </div>
15144       <div class="body">
15145         <p>A few days ago, I
15146 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">tried
15147 to install</a> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
15148 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
15149 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
15150 university infrastructure.  It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
15151 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
15152 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
15153 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
15154 around it.  Now I am a huge step further along that road.</p>
15155
15156 <p>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
15157 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
15158 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
15159 servers for Kerberos authentication.  All this without any
15160 configuration at all during installation.  My users home directory got
15161 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
15162 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured.  In addition to
15163 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
15164 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
15165 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf.  Iceweasel and KDE is
15166 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
15167 a proxy when at the university network.  If the machine is moved to a
15168 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
15169 gave it a IP address.</p>
15170
15171 <p>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
15172 entry ldap.$domain.  If this do not exist, it look for the
15173 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
15174 server.  Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
15175 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
15176 pick the first one as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
15177 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
15178 uppercase version of $domain.</p>
15179
15180 <p>So, what is not working, you might ask.  SMB mounting my home
15181 directory do not work.  No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
15182 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
15183 the cause.  These are not properly configured during installation, and
15184 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
15185 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(</p>
15186
15187 <p>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
15188 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
15189 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
15190 authentication.  It should also work out of the box in a Active
15191 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
15192 with UID and GID values.</p>
15193
15194 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
15195 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
15196
15197       </div>
15198       <div class="tags">
15199
15200
15201         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15202
15203
15204       </div>
15205     </div>
15206     <div class="padding"></div>
15207
15208     <div class="entry">
15209       <div class="title">
15210         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">Debian Edu roaming workstation - at the university of Oslo</a>
15211       </div>
15212       <div class="date">
15213          3rd August 2010
15214       </div>
15215       <div class="body">
15216         <p>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
15217 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
15218 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
15219 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
15220 infrastructure.  In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
15221 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
15222 servers.</p>
15223
15224 <p>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
15225 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
15226 /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
15227 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
15228 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
15229 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
15230 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
15231 .uio.no.</p>
15232
15233 <p>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
15234 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
15235 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
15236 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
15237 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
15238 university servers.</p>
15239
15240 <p>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
15241 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
15242 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
15243 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
15244 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
15245 uses.</p>
15246
15247       </div>
15248       <div class="tags">
15249
15250
15251         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15252
15253
15254       </div>
15255     </div>
15256     <div class="padding"></div>
15257
15258     <div class="entry">
15259       <div class="title">
15260         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
15261       </div>
15262       <div class="date">
15263         27th July 2010
15264       </div>
15265       <div class="body">
15266         <p>I discovered this while doing
15267 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
15268 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
15269 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
15270 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
15271 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
15272
15273 <p>An example is from todays
15274 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
15275 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
15276 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
15277 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
15278 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
15279 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
15280 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
15281
15282 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
15283
15284 <blockquote><pre>
15285 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
15286  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
15287   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
15288 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
15289  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
15290 </pre></blockquote>
15291
15292 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
15293 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
15294 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
15295 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
15296 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
15297 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
15298 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
15299 of dependency loops.</p>
15300
15301 <p>Thanks to
15302 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
15303 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
15304 dependencies
15305 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
15306 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
15307
15308 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
15309 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
15310 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
15311 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
15312 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
15313 it.</p>
15314
15315       </div>
15316       <div class="tags">
15317
15318
15319         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15320
15321
15322       </div>
15323     </div>
15324     <div class="padding"></div>
15325
15326     <div class="entry">
15327       <div class="title">
15328         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu_test_release__alpha0__based_on_Squeeze_is_released.html">First Debian Edu test release (alpha0) based on Squeeze is released</a>
15329       </div>
15330       <div class="date">
15331         27th July 2010
15332       </div>
15333       <div class="body">
15334         <p>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
15335 with the next Debian Edu release.  Not nearly done, but one major step
15336 completed.</p>
15337
15338 <blockquote>
15339 <p>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
15340 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
15341 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
15342 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
15343 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
15344 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
15345 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
15346 language of choice, please let us know too.</p>
15347
15348 <p>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
15349 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
15350 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.</p>
15351
15352 <p>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
15353 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
15354 much.</p>
15355
15356 <p>Changes compared to the lenny based version</p>
15357
15358 <ul>
15359 <li>Everything from Debian Squeeze
15360 <ul>
15361   <li>Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in
15362          combination with some new artwork
15363   <li>Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
15364   <li>OpenOffice.org 3.2
15365   <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
15366   <li>Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
15367   <li>Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
15368   <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
15369   <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
15370   <li>3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
15371   <li>Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
15372 </ul></li>
15373 <li>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
15374     Enabled for:
15375 <ul>
15376   <li>PAM
15377   <li>LDAP
15378   <li>IMAP
15379   <li>SMTP (sender verification)
15380 </ul>
15381 </li>
15382 <li>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.</li>
15383 <li>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
15384     fetched from LDAP.</li>
15385 <li>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.</li>
15386 <li>General cleanup (not finished)</li>
15387 </ul>
15388 <p>The following features are not working as they should</p>
15389
15390 <ul>
15391 <li>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
15392     scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
15393     for testing.</li>
15394 <li>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
15395     and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
15396     clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.</li>
15397 <li>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.</li>
15398 <li>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.</li>
15399 <li>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.</li>
15400 <li>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
15401     netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.</li>
15402 <li>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
15403     some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
15404     jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.</li>
15405 <li>Some packages lack translations. See
15406     http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
15407     and help out with translations.</li>
15408 </ul>
15409
15410 <p>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use</p>
15411
15412 <ul>
15413 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</a></li>
15414 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</a></li>
15415 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
15416 </ul>
15417 <p>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use</p>
15418
15419 <ul>
15420 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</a></li>
15421 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</a></li>
15422 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
15423 </ul>
15424
15425 <p>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
15426 get closer to the final release.</p>
15427
15428 <p>The MD5SUM of these images are</p>
15429
15430 <ul>
15431 <li>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
15432 <li>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
15433 </ul>
15434
15435 <p>The SHA1SUM of these images are</p>
15436 <ul>
15437 <li>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
15438 <li>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
15439 </ul>
15440 <p>How to report bugs:
15441 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla</p>
15442
15443 <p>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org</p>
15444 </blockquote>
15445
15446       </div>
15447       <div class="tags">
15448
15449
15450         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15451
15452
15453       </div>
15454     </div>
15455     <div class="padding"></div>
15456
15457     <div class="entry">
15458       <div class="title">
15459         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_step_closer_to_single_signon_in_Debian_Edu.html">One step closer to single signon in Debian Edu</a>
15460       </div>
15461       <div class="date">
15462         25th July 2010
15463       </div>
15464       <div class="body">
15465         <p>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
15466 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
15467 Edu/Skolelinux into shape.  This future version will use Kerberos for
15468 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
15469 getting rid of password questions one at the time.</p>
15470
15471 <p>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
15472 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
15473 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
15474 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server.  This
15475 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
15476 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
15477 package.  I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.</p>
15478
15479 <p>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
15480 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
15481 password when mounting the SMB volume.  A simple click on the shortcut
15482 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
15483 up. :)</p>
15484
15485 <p>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
15486 Debian Edu.  We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
15487 also Samba.  Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.</p>
15488
15489 <p>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
15490 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
15491 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
15492 the release.  It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
15493 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
15494 time for a alpha0 release today.  As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
15495 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
15496 release another day.</p>
15497
15498 <p>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
15499 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
15500
15501       </div>
15502       <div class="tags">
15503
15504
15505         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
15506
15507
15508       </div>
15509     </div>
15510     <div class="padding"></div>
15511
15512     <div class="entry">
15513       <div class="title">
15514         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenStreetmap_one_step_closer_to_having_routing_on_its_front_page.html">OpenStreetmap one step closer to having routing on its front page</a>
15515       </div>
15516       <div class="date">
15517         18th July 2010
15518       </div>
15519       <div class="body">
15520         <p>Thanks to
15521 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home">todays
15522 opengeodata blog entry</a>, I just discovered that the
15523 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
15524 <a href="http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT">support
15525 for calculating routes</a>.  The support is still experimental and
15526 only available from the development server, until more experience is
15527 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.</p>
15528
15529 <p>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
15530 was provided by <a href="http://maps.cloudmade.com/">Cloudmade</a>,
15531 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
15532 the issue.  I've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
15533 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
15534 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
15535 www.openstreetmap.org front page.</p>
15536
15537       </div>
15538       <div class="tags">
15539
15540
15541         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
15542
15543
15544       </div>
15545     </div>
15546     <div class="padding"></div>
15547
15548     <div class="entry">
15549       <div class="title">
15550         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html">What are they searching for - PowerDNS and ISC DHCP in LDAP</a>
15551       </div>
15552       <div class="date">
15553         17th July 2010
15554       </div>
15555       <div class="body">
15556         <p>This is a
15557 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
15558 on my
15559 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html">previous
15560 work</a> on
15561 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
15562 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
15563
15564 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
15565 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
15566 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
15567 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
15568
15569 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
15570 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
15571 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
15572
15573 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
15574
15575 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
15576 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
15577 the web.
15578
15579 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
15580 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
15581 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
15582 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
15583 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
15584 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
15585
15586 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
15587 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
15588 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
15589 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
15590 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
15591 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
15592 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
15593 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
15594 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
15595 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
15596 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
15597 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
15598 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
15599 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
15600 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
15601 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
15602
15603 <blockquote><pre>
15604 ldapsearch -h ldap \
15605   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
15606   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
15607   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
15608   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
15609   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
15610   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
15611
15612 ldapsearch -h ldap \
15613   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
15614   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
15615   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
15616   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
15617   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
15618 </pre></blockquote>
15619
15620 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
15621 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
15622 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
15623 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
15624 also exist.</p>
15625
15626 <blockquote><pre>
15627 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
15628 objectclass: top
15629 objectclass: dnsdomain
15630 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
15631 dc: tjener
15632 arecord: 10.0.2.2
15633 associateddomain: tjener.intern
15634
15635 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
15636 objectclass: top
15637 objectclass: dnsdomain2
15638 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
15639 dc: 2
15640 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
15641 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
15642 </pre></blockquote>
15643
15644 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
15645 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
15646 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
15647 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
15648 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
15649 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
15650 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
15651 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
15652 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
15653 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
15654 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
15655 instead.</p>
15656
15657 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
15658 like this:</p>
15659
15660 <blockquote><pre>
15661 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
15662   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
15663   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
15664   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
15665   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
15666   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
15667
15668 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
15669   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
15670 </pre></blockquote>
15671
15672 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
15673 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
15674 reverse lookups.</p>
15675
15676 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
15677 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
15678 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
15679 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
15680
15681 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
15682 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
15683 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
15684
15685 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
15686 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
15687 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
15688 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
15689 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
15690
15691 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
15692 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
15693 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
15694 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
15695 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
15696
15697 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
15698 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
15699 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
15700 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
15701 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
15702 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
15703
15704 <blockquote><pre>
15705 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
15706     SUP top
15707     AUXILIARY
15708     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
15709           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
15710           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
15711           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
15712           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
15713     ))
15714 </pre></blockquote>
15715
15716 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
15717 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
15718 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
15719 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
15720 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
15721 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
15722
15723 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
15724
15725 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
15726 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
15727 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
15728 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
15729 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
15730
15731 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
15732 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
15733 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
15734 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
15735
15736 <blockquote><pre>
15737 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
15738 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
15739 </pre></blockquote>
15740
15741 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
15742 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
15743 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
15744 search result is this entry:</p>
15745
15746 <blockquote><pre>
15747 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
15748 cn: dhcp
15749 objectClass: top
15750 objectClass: dhcpServer
15751 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
15752 </pre></blockquote>
15753
15754 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
15755 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
15756 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
15757 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
15758 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
15759 The search result is this entry:</p>
15760
15761 <blockquote><pre>
15762 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
15763 cn: DHCP Config
15764 objectClass: top
15765 objectClass: dhcpService
15766 objectClass: dhcpOptions
15767 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
15768 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
15769 dhcpStatements: authoritative
15770 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
15771 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
15772 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
15773 </pre></blockquote>
15774
15775 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
15776 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
15777 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
15778 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
15779 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
15780 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
15781 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
15782 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
15783 related computer objects.</p>
15784
15785 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
15786 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
15787 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
15788 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
15789 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
15790 like:</p>
15791
15792 <blockquote><pre>
15793 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
15794 cn: hostname
15795 objectClass: top
15796 objectClass: dhcpHost
15797 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
15798 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
15799 </pre></blockquote>
15800
15801 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
15802 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
15803 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
15804 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
15805 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
15806 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
15807 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
15808 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
15809 structural object class.
15810
15811 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
15812
15813 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
15814 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
15815 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
15816 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
15817 in the configuration.</p>
15818
15819 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
15820 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
15821 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
15822 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
15823 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
15824 structure.</p>
15825
15826 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
15827 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
15828
15829 <blockquote><pre>
15830 ou=services
15831   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
15832     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
15833     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
15834       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
15835         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
15836     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
15837       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
15838         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
15839     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
15840       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
15841 </pre></blockquote>
15842
15843 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
15844 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
15845 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
15846 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
15847
15848 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
15849 like this:</p>
15850
15851 <blockquote><pre>
15852 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
15853 dc: hostname
15854 objectClass: top
15855 objectClass: dhcpHost
15856 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
15857 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
15858 associateddomain: hostname.intern
15859 arecord: 10.11.12.13
15860 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
15861 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
15862 </pre></blockquote>
15863
15864 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
15865 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
15866 auxiliary object class.</p>
15867
15868       </div>
15869       <div class="tags">
15870
15871
15872         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15873
15874
15875       </div>
15876     </div>
15877     <div class="padding"></div>
15878
15879     <div class="entry">
15880       <div class="title">
15881         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
15882       </div>
15883       <div class="date">
15884         14th July 2010
15885       </div>
15886       <div class="body">
15887         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
15888 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
15889 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
15890 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
15891 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
15892
15893 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
15894 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
15895
15896 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
15897 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
15898 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
15899 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
15900 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
15901 to a slave DNS server.</p>
15902
15903 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
15904 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
15905 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
15906 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
15907 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
15908 seem to work.</p>
15909
15910 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
15911 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
15912 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
15913 this:</p>
15914
15915 <blockquote><pre>
15916   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
15917   cn: hostname
15918   objectClass: dhcphost
15919   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
15920   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
15921   associateddomain: hostname.intern
15922   arecord: 10.11.12.13
15923   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
15924   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
15925   ldapconfigsound: Y
15926 </pre></blockquote>
15927
15928 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
15929 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
15930 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
15931 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
15932
15933 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
15934 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
15935 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
15936 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
15937 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
15938 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
15939 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
15940 might be a good place to put it.</p>
15941
15942 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
15943 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
15944
15945       </div>
15946       <div class="tags">
15947
15948
15949         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15950
15951
15952       </div>
15953     </div>
15954     <div class="padding"></div>
15955
15956     <div class="entry">
15957       <div class="title">
15958         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
15959       </div>
15960       <div class="date">
15961         11th July 2010
15962       </div>
15963       <div class="body">
15964         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
15965 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
15966 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
15967 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
15968
15969 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
15970 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
15971 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
15972 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
15973 LTSP clients.</p>
15974
15975 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
15976 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
15977 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
15978
15979 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
15980 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
15981 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
15982
15983 <blockquote><pre>
15984 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
15985 #
15986 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
15987 #
15988 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
15989 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
15990 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
15991 #
15992 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
15993 # existence of attribute names.
15994 #
15995 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
15996 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
15997 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
15998 #
15999 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
16000 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
16001 #
16002 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
16003 #     SUP top
16004 #     AUXILIARY
16005 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
16006
16007 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
16008 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
16009     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
16010     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
16011         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
16012         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
16013             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
16014             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
16015             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
16016             # bass value on to clients
16017             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
16018         done
16019     done
16020 fi
16021 </pre></blockquote>
16022
16023 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
16024 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
16025 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
16026 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
16027 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
16028
16029 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
16030 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
16031
16032 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
16033 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
16034 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
16035 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
16036 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
16037 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
16038
16039       </div>
16040       <div class="tags">
16041
16042
16043         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
16044
16045
16046       </div>
16047     </div>
16048     <div class="padding"></div>
16049
16050     <div class="entry">
16051       <div class="title">
16052         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
16053       </div>
16054       <div class="date">
16055          9th July 2010
16056       </div>
16057       <div class="body">
16058         <p>Since
16059 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
16060 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
16061 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
16062 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
16063 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
16064 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
16065 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
16066 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
16067 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
16068 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
16069 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
16070 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
16071 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
16072
16073       </div>
16074       <div class="tags">
16075
16076
16077         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
16078
16079
16080       </div>
16081     </div>
16082     <div class="padding"></div>
16083
16084     <div class="entry">
16085       <div class="title">
16086         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop</a>
16087       </div>
16088       <div class="date">
16089          3rd July 2010
16090       </div>
16091       <div class="body">
16092         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
16093 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
16094 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
16095 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
16096 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
16097 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
16098 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
16099 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
16100
16101 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
16102 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
16103 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
16104 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
16105 publish the difference.</p>
16106
16107 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
16108
16109 <blockquote><p>
16110   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
16111   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
16112   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
16113   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
16114   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
16115   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
16116   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
16117   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
16118 </p></blockquote>
16119
16120 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
16121
16122 <blockquote><p>
16123   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
16124   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
16125   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
16126   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
16127   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
16128   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
16129   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
16130   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
16131   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
16132   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
16133   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
16134   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
16135   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
16136   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
16137   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
16138   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
16139   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
16140   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
16141   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
16142   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
16143 </p></blockquote>
16144
16145 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
16146
16147 <blockquote><p>
16148   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
16149   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
16150   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
16151   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
16152   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
16153   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
16154   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
16155   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
16156   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
16157   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
16158   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
16159   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
16160   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
16161   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
16162   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
16163   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
16164   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
16165   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
16166   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
16167   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
16168   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
16169 </p></blockquote>
16170
16171 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
16172
16173 <blockquote><p>
16174   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
16175   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
16176   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
16177 </p></blockquote>
16178
16179 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
16180 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
16181 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
16182 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
16183 the difference somewhat.
16184
16185       </div>
16186       <div class="tags">
16187
16188
16189         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16190
16191
16192       </div>
16193     </div>
16194     <div class="padding"></div>
16195
16196     <div class="entry">
16197       <div class="title">
16198         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Caching_password__user_and_group_on_a_roaming_Debian_laptop.html">Caching password, user and group on a roaming Debian laptop</a>
16199       </div>
16200       <div class="date">
16201          1st July 2010
16202       </div>
16203       <div class="body">
16204         <p>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
16205 a bit troubling.  Laptops are typically used also when not connected
16206 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
16207 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
16208 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
16209 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
16210 in Debian.  Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
16211 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
16212 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.</p>
16213
16214 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
16215
16216 This is the traditional method with a twist.  The password caching is
16217 provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
16218 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd.  The directory
16219 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP.  If one want to use
16220 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
16221 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal.  If one is happy having a
16222 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
16223 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
16224 using libpam-mklocaluser.  A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
16225 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
16226 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/568577">bug #568577</a> is in the
16227 archive.  Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
16228 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
16229 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/.  This
16230 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.</p>
16231
16232 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured</p>
16233
16234 <blockquote><pre>
16235 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
16236 </pre></blockquote>
16237
16238 <p>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
16239 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site.  Make sure the
16240 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
16241 sent in clear text to the LDAP server.  I've been unable to get TLS
16242 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
16243 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
16244 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
16245 on how to get this working.</p>
16246
16247 <p>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
16248 caching until <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">bug #485282</a>
16249 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
16250 currently in /etc/nscd.conf.  The changes are in the fields
16251 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
16252 instructions I found in the
16253 <a href="http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/">LDAP for Mobile Laptops</a>
16254 instructions by Flyn Computing.</p>
16255
16256 <blockquote><pre>
16257         debug-level             0
16258         reload-count            unlimited
16259         paranoia                no
16260
16261         enable-cache            passwd          yes
16262         positive-time-to-live   passwd          2592000
16263         negative-time-to-live   passwd          20
16264         suggested-size          passwd          211
16265         check-files             passwd          yes
16266         persistent              passwd          yes
16267         shared                  passwd          yes
16268         max-db-size             passwd          33554432
16269         auto-propagate          passwd          yes
16270
16271         enable-cache            group           yes
16272         positive-time-to-live   group           2592000
16273         negative-time-to-live   group           20
16274         suggested-size          group           211
16275         check-files             group           yes
16276         persistent              group           yes
16277         shared                  group           yes
16278         max-db-size             group           33554432
16279         auto-propagate          group           yes
16280
16281         enable-cache            hosts           no
16282         positive-time-to-live   hosts           2592000
16283         negative-time-to-live   hosts           20
16284         suggested-size          hosts           211
16285         check-files             hosts           yes
16286         persistent              hosts           yes
16287         shared                  hosts           yes
16288         max-db-size             hosts           33554432
16289
16290         enable-cache            services        yes
16291         positive-time-to-live   services        2592000
16292         negative-time-to-live   services        20
16293         suggested-size          services        211
16294         check-files             services        yes
16295         persistent              services        yes
16296         shared                  services        yes
16297         max-db-size             services        33554432
16298 </pre></blockquote>
16299
16300 <p>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
16301 automatically like the one provided in
16302 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/496915">bug #496915</a>, the file
16303 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
16304 directory service on the machine.  /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
16305 look like this:</p>
16306
16307 <blockquote><pre>
16308 passwd:         files ldap
16309 group:          files ldap
16310 shadow:         files ldap
16311 hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
16312 networks:       files
16313 protocols:      files
16314 services:       files
16315 ethers:         files
16316 rpc:            files
16317 netgroup:       files ldap
16318 </pre></blockquote>
16319
16320 <p>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
16321 shadow and netgroup.</p>
16322
16323 <p>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
16324 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
16325 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
16326 attributes cached.
16327
16328 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
16329   libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
16330
16331 <p>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
16332 problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to
16333 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
16334 LDAP database is available.  I have not tested such setup, because I
16335 discovered sssd.</p>
16336
16337 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser</h2>
16338
16339 <p>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
16340 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
16341 <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/">sssd</a> package from Redhat.
16342 It is part of the <a href="http://www.freeipa.org/">FreeIPA</A> project
16343 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
16344 machines.  The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
16345 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
16346 libpam-ccreds.  It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS.  Version
16347 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
16348 in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010.  Because the
16349 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd package</a>
16350 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
16351 version 1.2 is now in testing.
16352
16353 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
16354 roaming setup I want</p>
16355
16356 <blockquote><pre>
16357 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
16358 </pre></blockquote>
16359
16360 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
16361 <tt>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf</tt>.
16362
16363 <blockquote><pre>
16364 [sssd]
16365 config_file_version = 2
16366 reconnection_retries = 3
16367 sbus_timeout = 30
16368 services = nss, pam
16369 domains = INTERN
16370
16371 [nss]
16372 filter_groups = root
16373 filter_users = root
16374 reconnection_retries = 3
16375
16376 [pam]
16377 reconnection_retries = 3
16378
16379 [domain/INTERN]
16380 enumerate = false
16381 cache_credentials = true
16382
16383 id_provider = ldap
16384 auth_provider = ldap
16385 chpass_provider = ldap
16386
16387 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
16388 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
16389 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
16390 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
16391 </pre></blockquote>
16392
16393 <p>I got the same problem here with certificate checking.  Had to set
16394 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working.</p>
16395
16396 <p>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
16397 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
16398 modify it manually.</p>
16399
16400 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
16401 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
16402
16403       </div>
16404       <div class="tags">
16405
16406
16407         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
16408
16409
16410       </div>
16411     </div>
16412     <div class="padding"></div>
16413
16414     <div class="entry">
16415       <div class="title">
16416         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
16417       </div>
16418       <div class="date">
16419         28th June 2010
16420       </div>
16421       <div class="body">
16422         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
16423 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
16424 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
16425 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
16426 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
16427 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
16428 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
16429 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
16430 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
16431 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
16432
16433 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
16434 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
16435 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
16436 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
16437 released.</p>
16438
16439 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
16440 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
16441 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
16442 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
16443
16444 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
16445 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
16446
16447 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
16448 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
16449 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
16450 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
16451 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
16452
16453       </div>
16454       <div class="tags">
16455
16456
16457         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
16458
16459
16460       </div>
16461     </div>
16462     <div class="padding"></div>
16463
16464     <div class="entry">
16465       <div class="title">
16466         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html">Idea for a change to LDAP schemas allowing DNS and DHCP info to be combined into one object</a>
16467       </div>
16468       <div class="date">
16469         24th June 2010
16470       </div>
16471       <div class="body">
16472         <p>A while back, I
16473 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
16474 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
16475 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
16476 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
16477
16478 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
16479 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
16480 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
16481 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
16482
16483 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
16484 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
16485 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
16486 Debian Edu.</p>
16487
16488 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
16489 the
16490 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
16491 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
16492 available today from IETF.</p>
16493
16494 <pre>
16495 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
16496 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
16497 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
16498  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
16499         NAME 'dhcpHost'
16500         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
16501 -       SUP top
16502 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
16503         MUST cn
16504         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
16505         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
16506 </pre>
16507
16508 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
16509 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
16510 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
16511
16512 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
16513 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
16514
16515       </div>
16516       <div class="tags">
16517
16518
16519         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
16520
16521
16522       </div>
16523     </div>
16524     <div class="padding"></div>
16525
16526     <div class="entry">
16527       <div class="title">
16528         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html">Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output</a>
16529       </div>
16530       <div class="date">
16531         16th June 2010
16532       </div>
16533       <div class="body">
16534         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
16535 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
16536 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
16537 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
16538 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
16539 this:
16540
16541 <blockquote><pre>
16542 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
16543 tasksel --new-install
16544 </pre></blockquote>
16545
16546 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
16547 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
16548 any output what so ever.
16549
16550 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
16551 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
16552 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
16553 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
16554 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
16555 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
16556 code like this:
16557
16558 <blockquote><pre>
16559 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
16560 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
16561 $cmd
16562 </pre></blockquote>
16563
16564 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
16565 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
16566 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
16567 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
16568 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
16569 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
16570 installation.</p>
16571
16572 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
16573 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
16574 like this.</p>
16575
16576       </div>
16577       <div class="tags">
16578
16579
16580         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
16581
16582
16583       </div>
16584     </div>
16585     <div class="padding"></div>
16586
16587     <div class="entry">
16588       <div class="title">
16589         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">Officeshots taking shape</a>
16590       </div>
16591       <div class="date">
16592         13th June 2010
16593       </div>
16594       <div class="body">
16595         <p>For those of us caring about document exchange and
16596 interoperability, <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>
16597 is a great service.  It is to ODF documents what
16598 <a href="http://browsershots.org/">BrowserShots</a> is for web
16599 pages.</p>
16600
16601 <p>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
16602 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
16603 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
16604 interested in supporting the project.  I helped him to navigate his
16605 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
16606 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
16607 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot.  The machine is
16608 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
16609 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
16610 see how the project is doing.</p>
16611
16612 <p>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
16613 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
16614 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
16615 in 17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
16616 Windows.  This is great.</p>
16617
16618       </div>
16619       <div class="tags">
16620
16621
16622         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
16623
16624
16625       </div>
16626     </div>
16627     <div class="padding"></div>
16628
16629     <div class="entry">
16630       <div class="title">
16631         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, removals by apt and aptitude</a>
16632       </div>
16633       <div class="date">
16634         13th June 2010
16635       </div>
16636       <div class="body">
16637         <p>My
16638 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
16639 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
16640 finally made the upgrade logs available from
16641 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
16642 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
16643 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
16644 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
16645
16646 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
16647 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
16648 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
16649 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
16650 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
16651 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
16652 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
16653 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
16654
16655 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
16656 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
16657 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
16658 too surprising.</p>
16659
16660 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
16661 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
16662 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
16663 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
16664 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
16665 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
16666 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
16667 continue.</p>
16668
16669 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
16670 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
16671   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
16672   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
16673   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
16674   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
16675   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
16676   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
16677   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
16678   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
16679   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
16680   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
16681   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
16682   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
16683   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
16684   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
16685   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
16686   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
16687   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
16688   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
16689   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
16690   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
16691   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
16692   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
16693   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
16694   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
16695   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
16696   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
16697   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
16698   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
16699
16700 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
16701
16702 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
16703   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
16704   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
16705   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
16706   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
16707   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
16708   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
16709   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
16710   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
16711   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
16712   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
16713   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
16714   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
16715   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
16716   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
16717   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
16718   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
16719   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
16720   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
16721   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
16722   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
16723   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
16724   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
16725   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
16726   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
16727   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
16728   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
16729   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
16730   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
16731   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
16732   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
16733   zip</p>
16734
16735 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
16736
16737 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
16738   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
16739   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
16740   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
16741   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
16742   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
16743   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
16744   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
16745   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
16746   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
16747   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
16748   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
16749   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
16750   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
16751   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
16752   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
16753   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
16754   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
16755   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
16756   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
16757   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
16758   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
16759   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
16760   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
16761   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
16762   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
16763   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
16764   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
16765
16766 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
16767 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
16768   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
16769   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
16770   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
16771   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
16772   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
16773   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
16774   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
16775   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
16776   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
16777   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
16778   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
16779   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
16780   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
16781   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
16782   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
16783   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
16784   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
16785   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
16786   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
16787   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
16788   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
16789   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
16790   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
16791   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
16792   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
16793   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
16794   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
16795   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
16796   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
16797   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
16798   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
16799   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
16800   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
16801   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
16802   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
16803   xulrunner-1.9</p>
16804
16805
16806       </div>
16807       <div class="tags">
16808
16809
16810         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16811
16812
16813       </div>
16814     </div>
16815     <div class="padding"></div>
16816
16817     <div class="entry">
16818       <div class="title">
16819         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
16820       </div>
16821       <div class="date">
16822         11th June 2010
16823       </div>
16824       <div class="body">
16825         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
16826 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
16827 have been discovered and reported in the process
16828 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
16829 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
16830 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
16831 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
16832 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
16833
16834 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
16835 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
16836 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
16837 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
16838 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
16839 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
16840
16841 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
16842 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
16843 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
16844 is created.  The bug report
16845 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
16846 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
16847 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
16848 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
16849 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
16850 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
16851 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
16852 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
16853 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
16854 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
16855 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
16856 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
16857 Debian Squeeze.</p>
16858
16859 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
16860 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
16861 trick:</p>
16862
16863 <blockquote><pre>
16864 #!/bin/sh
16865 set -ex
16866
16867 if [ "$1" ] ; then
16868     desktop=$1
16869 else
16870     desktop=gnome
16871 fi
16872
16873 from=lenny
16874 to=squeeze
16875
16876 exec &lt; /dev/null
16877 unset LANG
16878 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
16879 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
16880 fuser -mv .
16881 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
16882 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
16883 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
16884 #!/bin/sh
16885 exit 101
16886 EOF
16887 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
16888 exit_cleanup() {
16889     umount $tmpdir/proc
16890 }
16891 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
16892 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
16893 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
16894
16895 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
16896
16897 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
16898 # to return the correct answers.
16899 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
16900     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
16901
16902 # Include the desktop and laptop task
16903 for test in desktop laptop ; do
16904     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
16905 #!/bin/sh
16906 exit 2
16907 EOF
16908     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
16909 done
16910
16911 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
16912 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
16913 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
16914 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
16915
16916 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
16917 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
16918 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
16919 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
16920 fuser -mv
16921 </pre></blockquote>
16922
16923 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
16924 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
16925 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
16926 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
16927 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
16928 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
16929
16930 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
16931 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
16932 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
16933 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
16934 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
16935 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
16936 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
16937
16938 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
16939 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
16940 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
16941 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
16942 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
16943 packages.</p>
16944
16945       </div>
16946       <div class="tags">
16947
16948
16949         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16950
16951
16952       </div>
16953     </div>
16954     <div class="padding"></div>
16955
16956     <div class="entry">
16957       <div class="title">
16958         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html">Upstart or sysvinit - as init.d scripts see it</a>
16959       </div>
16960       <div class="date">
16961          6th June 2010
16962       </div>
16963       <div class="body">
16964         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
16965 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
16966 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
16967 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
16968 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
16969 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
16970 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
16971
16972 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
16973 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
16974 COLUMNS):</p>
16975
16976 <blockquote><pre>
16977 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
16978 previous=N
16979 PREVLEVEL=
16980 RUNLEVEL=
16981 runlevel=S
16982 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
16983 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
16984 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
16985 </pre></blockquote>
16986
16987 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
16988 script.</p>
16989
16990 <blockquote><pre>
16991 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
16992 previous=N
16993 PREVLEVEL=N
16994 RUNLEVEL=S
16995 runlevel=S
16996 </pre></blockquote>
16997
16998 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
16999 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
17000 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
17001
17002 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
17003 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
17004 choice.</p>
17005
17006       </div>
17007       <div class="tags">
17008
17009
17010         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17011
17012
17013       </div>
17014     </div>
17015     <div class="padding"></div>
17016
17017     <div class="entry">
17018       <div class="title">
17019         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
17020       </div>
17021       <div class="date">
17022          6th June 2010
17023       </div>
17024       <div class="body">
17025         <p>Via the
17026 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
17027 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
17028 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
17029 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
17030 following the standards wars of today.</p>
17031
17032       </div>
17033       <div class="tags">
17034
17035
17036         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
17037
17038
17039       </div>
17040     </div>
17041     <div class="padding"></div>
17042
17043     <div class="entry">
17044       <div class="title">
17045         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing computer hardware models used at site</a>
17046       </div>
17047       <div class="date">
17048          3rd June 2010
17049       </div>
17050       <div class="body">
17051         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
17052 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
17053 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
17054 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
17055 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
17056
17057 <blockquote><pre>
17058 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
17059   vendor                    count
17060   Dell Computer Corporation     1
17061     PowerEdge 1750              1
17062   IBM                           1
17063     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
17064   Intel                         2
17065   [no-dmi-info]                 3
17066 maintainer:~#
17067 </pre></blockquote>
17068
17069 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
17070 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
17071 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
17072 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
17073 option to list the individual machines.</p>
17074
17075 <p>A larger list is
17076 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
17077 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
17078 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
17079 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
17080 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
17081 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
17082 collector.</p>
17083
17084       </div>
17085       <div class="tags">
17086
17087
17088         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
17089
17090
17091       </div>
17092     </div>
17093     <div class="padding"></div>
17094
17095     <div class="entry">
17096       <div class="title">
17097         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html">KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?</a>
17098       </div>
17099       <div class="date">
17100          1st June 2010
17101       </div>
17102       <div class="body">
17103         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
17104 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
17105 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
17106 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
17107 wait.</p>
17108
17109 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
17110 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
17111 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
17112 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
17113 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
17114 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
17115
17116 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
17117 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
17118 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
17119 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
17120 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
17121 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
17122 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
17123 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
17124
17125 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
17126
17127       </div>
17128       <div class="tags">
17129
17130
17131         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17132
17133
17134       </div>
17135     </div>
17136     <div class="padding"></div>
17137
17138     <div class="entry">
17139       <div class="title">
17140         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html">Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing</a>
17141       </div>
17142       <div class="date">
17143         27th May 2010
17144       </div>
17145       <div class="body">
17146         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
17147 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
17148 issues are known and should be solved:
17149
17150 <p><ul>
17151
17152 <li>The wicd package seen to
17153 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
17154 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
17155 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
17156 seem to be on the case.</li>
17157
17158 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
17159 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
17160 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
17161 maintainer is on the case.</li>
17162
17163 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
17164 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
17165 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
17166 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
17167 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
17168 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
17169 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
17170 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
17171
17172 </ul></p>
17173
17174 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
17175 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
17176 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
17177 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
17178
17179 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
17180 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
17181 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
17182 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
17183
17184 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
17185
17186       </div>
17187       <div class="tags">
17188
17189
17190         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17191
17192
17193       </div>
17194     </div>
17195     <div class="padding"></div>
17196
17197     <div class="entry">
17198       <div class="title">
17199         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
17200       </div>
17201       <div class="date">
17202         22nd May 2010
17203       </div>
17204       <div class="body">
17205         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
17206 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
17207 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
17208 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
17209
17210 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
17211 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
17212 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
17213 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
17214 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
17215 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
17216 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
17217 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
17218 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
17219 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
17220 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
17221 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
17222 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
17223 going to work.</p>
17224
17225 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
17226 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
17227 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
17228 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
17229 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
17230 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
17231 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
17232 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
17233 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
17234 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
17235 Edu.</p>
17236
17237 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
17238 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
17239 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
17240 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
17241 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
17242 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
17243
17244 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
17245 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
17246
17247       </div>
17248       <div class="tags">
17249
17250
17251         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17252
17253
17254       </div>
17255     </div>
17256     <div class="padding"></div>
17257
17258     <div class="entry">
17259       <div class="title">
17260         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html">Pieces of the roaming laptop puzzle in Debian</a>
17261       </div>
17262       <div class="date">
17263         19th May 2010
17264       </div>
17265       <div class="body">
17266         <p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
17267 Edu finally entered the Debian archive.  Today, the new
17268 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
17269 package was accepted.  Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
17270 into unstable.  The
17271 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
17272 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
17273 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
17274 passed NEW on Monday.  In addition, the
17275 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
17276 package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
17277 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
17278
17279 <p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
17280 roaming laptops.  The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
17281 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
17282 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
17283 for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
17284 #485282</a> is implemented.  The alternative setup is to use sssd with
17285 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
17286 care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
17287
17288 <p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
17289 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
17290 problem with the server certificate.  I plan to update the Debian
17291 package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
17292 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
17293 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches.  Upstream is friendly and responsive,
17294 and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
17295
17296 <p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
17297 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
17298 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
17299 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
17300 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information.  The
17301 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
17302 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
17303 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used.  To avoid confusion
17304 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
17305 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
17306 on the home directory servers.</p>
17307
17308 <p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
17309 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
17310 is created.  Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
17311 message.  The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
17312 a bug in gdm.  Have not investigated if there is some other message
17313 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
17314
17315 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
17316 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
17317
17318       </div>
17319       <div class="tags">
17320
17321
17322         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
17323
17324
17325       </div>
17326     </div>
17327     <div class="padding"></div>
17328
17329     <div class="entry">
17330       <div class="title">
17331         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html">Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable</a>
17332       </div>
17333       <div class="date">
17334         14th May 2010
17335       </div>
17336       <div class="body">
17337         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
17338 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
17339 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
17340 expected, if I am to believe the
17341 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
17342 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
17343 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
17344 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
17345 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
17346 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
17347 version.</p>
17348
17349 More information about
17350 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
17351 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
17352 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
17353 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
17354
17355 <blockquote><pre>
17356 CONCURRENCY=none
17357 </pre></blockquote>
17358
17359 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
17360 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
17361 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
17362 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
17363
17364       </div>
17365       <div class="tags">
17366
17367
17368         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17369
17370
17371       </div>
17372     </div>
17373     <div class="padding"></div>
17374
17375     <div class="entry">
17376       <div class="title">
17377         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients</a>
17378       </div>
17379       <div class="date">
17380         14th May 2010
17381       </div>
17382       <div class="body">
17383         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
17384 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
17385 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
17386 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
17387 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
17388 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
17389 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
17390 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
17391
17392 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
17393 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
17394 this on the collector host:</p>
17395
17396 <blockquote><pre>
17397 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
17398 </pre></blockquote>
17399
17400 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
17401 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
17402
17403 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
17404 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
17405 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
17406 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
17407 written yet.</p>
17408
17409       </div>
17410       <div class="tags">
17411
17412
17413         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
17414
17415
17416       </div>
17417     </div>
17418     <div class="padding"></div>
17419
17420     <div class="entry">
17421       <div class="title">
17422         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
17423       </div>
17424       <div class="date">
17425         13th May 2010
17426       </div>
17427       <div class="body">
17428         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
17429 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
17430 has been
17431 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
17432
17433 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
17434 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
17435 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
17436 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
17437 based boot system.  Tollef is
17438 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
17439 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
17440 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
17441 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
17442 at the moment do not.</p>
17443
17444 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
17445 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
17446 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
17447 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
17448 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
17449 way forward.</p>
17450
17451 <p>In the mean time, based on the
17452 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
17453 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
17454 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
17455 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
17456 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
17457 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
17458 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
17459 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
17460
17461       </div>
17462       <div class="tags">
17463
17464
17465         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
17466
17467
17468       </div>
17469     </div>
17470     <div class="padding"></div>
17471
17472     <div class="entry">
17473       <div class="title">
17474         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html">Parallellizing the boot in Debian Squeeze - ready for wider testing</a>
17475       </div>
17476       <div class="date">
17477          6th May 2010
17478       </div>
17479       <div class="body">
17480         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
17481 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
17482 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
17483 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
17484 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
17485 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
17486 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
17487
17488 <blockquote><pre>
17489 CONCURRENCY=makefile
17490 </pre></blockquote>
17491
17492 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
17493 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
17494 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
17495 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
17496 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
17497 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
17498 make this happen.</p>
17499
17500 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
17501 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
17502 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
17503 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
17504 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
17505
17506 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
17507 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
17508 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
17509 fix the remaining issues.</p>
17510
17511 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
17512 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
17513 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
17514 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
17515
17516       </div>
17517       <div class="tags">
17518
17519
17520         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17521
17522
17523       </div>
17524     </div>
17525     <div class="padding"></div>
17526
17527     <div class="entry">
17528       <div class="title">
17529         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Forcing_new_users_to_change_their_password_on_first_login.html">Forcing new users to change their password on first login</a>
17530       </div>
17531       <div class="date">
17532          2nd May 2010
17533       </div>
17534       <div class="body">
17535         <p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
17536 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
17537 change the password on the first login attempt.</p>
17538
17539 <p>I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
17540 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account.  The account
17541 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
17542 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
17543 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.</p>
17544
17545 <p>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
17546 settings in /etc/shadow:</p>
17547
17548 <blockquote><pre>
17549 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
17550 Last password change                                    : May 02, 2010
17551 Password expires                                        : never
17552 Password inactive                                       : never
17553 Account expires                                         : never
17554 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
17555 Maximum number of days between password change          : 99999
17556 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
17557 root@tjener:~#
17558 </pre></blockquote>
17559
17560 <p>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
17561 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
17562 lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
17563 to the difference in days between that date and today.  To make it
17564 simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
17565 avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).</p>
17566
17567 <p>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
17568 intended:</p>
17569
17570 <blockquote><pre>
17571 root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
17572 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
17573 Last password change                                    : Jan 02, 1970
17574 Password expires                                        : never
17575 Password inactive                                       : never
17576 Account expires                                         : never
17577 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
17578 Maximum number of days between password change          : 10950
17579 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
17580 root@tjener:~#
17581 </pre></blockquote>
17582
17583 <p>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
17584 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
17585 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).</p>
17586
17587 <p>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
17588 sure only the user itself have the account password?</p>
17589
17590 <p>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
17591 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
17592
17593 <p>Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
17594 shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
17595 last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
17596 on the first login.  This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
17597 I did not notice this in my initial testing.  I have tested it on
17598 Squeeze, and '<tt>chage -d 0 username</tt>' do work there.  I have not
17599 tested it on Lenny yet.</p>
17600
17601 <p>Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
17602 equivalent command to expire a password is '<tt>passwd -e
17603 username</tt>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
17604 change.</p>
17605
17606       </div>
17607       <div class="tags">
17608
17609
17610         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
17611
17612
17613       </div>
17614     </div>
17615     <div class="padding"></div>
17616
17617     <div class="entry">
17618       <div class="title">
17619         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thoughts_on_roaming_laptop_setup_for_Debian_Edu.html">Thoughts on roaming laptop setup for Debian Edu</a>
17620       </div>
17621       <div class="date">
17622         28th April 2010
17623       </div>
17624       <div class="body">
17625         <p>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
17626 Debian Edu.  The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
17627 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
17628 and go.</p>
17629
17630 <p>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
17631 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
17632 example called Roaming Workstations.  Here are my thought on this.
17633 The setup would consist of the following:</p>
17634
17635 <ul>
17636
17637  <li>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
17638    the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
17639    the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
17640    server.  This allow the user to work also when offline.  The
17641    central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
17642    request, for example mounted via CIFS.  It could be mounted
17643    automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
17644    and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
17645    hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
17646    request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
17647    can be used to access it when needed.  Perhaps it is enough to use
17648    the fish protocol in KDE?</li>
17649
17650  <li>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
17651    authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
17652    to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
17653    to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server.  This can be done using
17654    <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
17655    or the Fedora developed
17656    <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
17657    Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
17658
17659  <li>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
17660    using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
17661    directory, using unison.</li>
17662
17663  <li>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
17664    their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
17665    the box with CUPS.  For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
17666    system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
17667    implemented.</li>
17668
17669  <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
17670    sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
17671
17672  <li>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
17673    cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
17674    local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.</li>
17675
17676 </ul>
17677
17678 <p>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
17679 the moment.  If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
17680 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze.  Some of the pieces need
17681 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
17682 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) and nslcd (or
17683 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
17684 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
17685 when disconnected from the net.  If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
17686 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.</p>
17687
17688 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
17689 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
17690
17691       </div>
17692       <div class="tags">
17693
17694
17695         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
17696
17697
17698       </div>
17699     </div>
17700     <div class="padding"></div>
17701
17702     <div class="entry">
17703       <div class="title">
17704         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Great_book___Content__Selected_Essays_on_Technology__Creativity__Copyright__and_the_Future_of_the_Future_.html">Great book: "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future"</a>
17705       </div>
17706       <div class="date">
17707         19th April 2010
17708       </div>
17709       <div class="body">
17710         <p>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
17711 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
17712 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
17713 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
17714 book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
17715 Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few
17716 restrictions on the web, for example from
17717 <a href="http://craphound.com/content/">his own site</a>. I read the
17718 epub-version from
17719 <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883">feedbooks</a> using
17720 <a href="http://www.fbreader.org/">fbreader</a> and my N810. I
17721 strongly recommend this book.</p>
17722
17723       </div>
17724       <div class="tags">
17725
17726
17727         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
17728
17729
17730       </div>
17731     </div>
17732     <div class="padding"></div>
17733
17734     <div class="entry">
17735       <div class="title">
17736         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html">Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</a>
17737       </div>
17738       <div class="date">
17739         14th April 2010
17740       </div>
17741       <div class="body">
17742         <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
17743 NUUG presentation</a> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
17744 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux.  Setting up a
17745 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
17746 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
17747 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
17748 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
17749 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
17750 users and cryptographic keys instead.</p>
17751
17752 <p>A challenge will be integration and administration.  Is there a
17753 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
17754 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups?  With it, the
17755 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
17756 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.</p>
17757
17758 <p>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
17759 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together.  Anyone know?</p>
17760
17761 <p>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
17762 Nagios.  I have no idea how much work that will be to implement.  We
17763 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
17764 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
17765 to work properly.</p>
17766
17767 <p>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
17768 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
17769 configuration and integration.  A natural starting point would be
17770 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
17771 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
17772 time.</p>
17773
17774 <p>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
17775 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
17776 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home.  The video show show
17777 up in a few days.</p>
17778
17779       </div>
17780       <div class="tags">
17781
17782
17783         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
17784
17785
17786       </div>
17787     </div>
17788     <div class="padding"></div>
17789
17790     <div class="entry">
17791       <div class="title">
17792         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/After_6_years_of_waiting__the_Xreset_d_feature_is_implemented.html">After 6 years of waiting, the Xreset.d feature is implemented</a>
17793       </div>
17794       <div class="date">
17795          6th March 2010
17796       </div>
17797       <div class="body">
17798         <p>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
17799 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
17800 when the user log out.  A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
17801 package in 2004 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/230422">#230422</a>),
17802 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
17803 Today, this finally paid off.</p>
17804
17805 <p>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
17806 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
17807 been updated to use this framework.  Next on my agenda is to make sure
17808 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.</p>
17809
17810 <p>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
17811 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
17812 after a user.  With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
17813 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
17814 framework.  My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
17815 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.<p>
17816
17817       </div>
17818       <div class="tags">
17819
17820
17821         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
17822
17823
17824       </div>
17825     </div>
17826     <div class="padding"></div>
17827
17828     <div class="entry">
17829       <div class="title">
17830         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Lenny_released__work_continues.html">Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Lenny released, work continues</a>
17831       </div>
17832       <div class="date">
17833         11th February 2010
17834       </div>
17835       <div class="body">
17836         <p>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
17837 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> was finally
17838 shipped.  This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
17839 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up.  Work on the first
17840 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
17841 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
17842 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.</p>
17843
17844 <p>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?</p>
17845
17846 <p>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
17847 next major release, based on Squeeze.  We will try to get as many of
17848 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
17849 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.</p>
17850
17851       </div>
17852       <div class="tags">
17853
17854
17855         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
17856
17857
17858       </div>
17859     </div>
17860     <div class="padding"></div>
17861
17862     <div class="entry">
17863       <div class="title">
17864         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html">Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</a>
17865       </div>
17866       <div class="date">
17867         27th January 2010
17868       </div>
17869       <div class="body">
17870         <p>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
17871 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
17872 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
17873 Nagios.  The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
17874 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
17875 further.</p>
17876
17877 <p>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
17878 configured as a Munin and Nagios server.  In addition, it is
17879 configured to be a server for the
17880 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">SiteSummary
17881 system</a> I have written for use in Debian Edu.  The SiteSummary
17882 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
17883 work.  In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
17884 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
17885 computer submitting information to this collector.  This allow for
17886 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
17887 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
17888 packages got etc.  This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
17889 and Nagios configuration.</p>
17890
17891 <p>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
17892 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
17893 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
17894 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.</p>
17895
17896 <p>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
17897 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
17898 services detected).  In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
17899 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
17900 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
17901 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
17902 the machine.</p>
17903
17904 <p>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
17905 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
17906 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
17907 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.</p>
17908
17909 <p>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
17910 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP.  The system
17911 administrator need to run "<tt>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
17912 nagiosadmin</tt>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
17913 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages.  After that,
17914 everything is taken care of.</p>
17915
17916       </div>
17917       <div class="tags">
17918
17919
17920         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
17921
17922
17923       </div>
17924     </div>
17925     <div class="padding"></div>
17926
17927     <div class="entry">
17928       <div class="title">
17929         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Relative_popularity_of_document_formats__MS_Office_vs__ODF_.html">Relative popularity of document formats (MS Office vs. ODF)</a>
17930       </div>
17931       <div class="date">
17932         12th August 2009
17933       </div>
17934       <div class="body">
17935         <p>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
17936 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
17937 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage.  I searched using
17938 'filetype:odt' and equvalent terms, and got these results:</P>
17939
17940 <table>
17941 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
17942 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:282000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
17943 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:75600</td> <td>pptx:183000</td></tr>
17944 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:145000</td></tr>
17945 </table>
17946
17947 <p>Next, I added a 'site:no' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
17948 got these numbers:</p>
17949
17950 <table>
17951 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
17952 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480 </td> <td>docx:4460</td></tr>
17953 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:299   </td> <td>pptx:741</td></tr>
17954 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:187       </td> <td>xlsx:372</td></tr>
17955 </table>
17956
17957 <p>I wonder how these numbers change over time.</p>
17958
17959 <p>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
17960 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
17961 they are conduced in another country.  Because of this, I did the same
17962 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
17963 search done from a machine here in Norway.</p>
17964
17965
17966 <table>
17967 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
17968 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:129000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
17969 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:44200</td> <td>pptx:93900</td></tr>
17970 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:82400</td></tr>
17971 </table>
17972
17973 <p>And with 'site:no':
17974
17975 <table>
17976 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
17977 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480</td> <td>docx:3410</td></tr>
17978 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:175</td> <td>pptx:604</td></tr>
17979 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:186       </td> <td>xlsx:296</td></tr>
17980 </table>
17981
17982 <p>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
17983 numbers.</p>
17984
17985       </div>
17986       <div class="tags">
17987
17988
17989         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
17990
17991
17992       </div>
17993     </div>
17994     <div class="padding"></div>
17995
17996     <div class="entry">
17997       <div class="title">
17998         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html">ISO still hope to fix OOXML</a>
17999       </div>
18000       <div class="date">
18001          8th August 2009
18002       </div>
18003       <div class="body">
18004         <p>According to <a
18005 href="http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html">a
18006 blog post from Torsten Werner</a>, the current defect report for ISO
18007 29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages.  His interesting point is that the
18008 defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
18009 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
18010 can be fixed in ISO.  Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
18011 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
18012 close to solving the problems.  I was part of the Norwegian committee
18013 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
18014 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.</p>
18015
18016 <p>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
18017 with the future ahead of it.  We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
18018 seminar this autumn.</p>
18019
18020       </div>
18021       <div class="tags">
18022
18023
18024         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
18025
18026
18027       </div>
18028     </div>
18029     <div class="padding"></div>
18030
18031     <div class="entry">
18032       <div class="title">
18033         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html">Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing</a>
18034       </div>
18035       <div class="date">
18036         27th July 2009
18037       </div>
18038       <div class="body">
18039         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
18040 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
18041 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
18042 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
18043 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
18044 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
18045 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
18046
18047 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
18048 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
18049 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
18050
18051       </div>
18052       <div class="tags">
18053
18054
18055         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
18056
18057
18058       </div>
18059     </div>
18060     <div class="padding"></div>
18061
18062     <div class="entry">
18063       <div class="title">
18064         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
18065       </div>
18066       <div class="date">
18067         22nd July 2009
18068       </div>
18069       <div class="body">
18070         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
18071 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
18072 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
18073 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
18074 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
18075 the package up to date.</p>
18076
18077 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
18078 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
18079 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
18080 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
18081 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
18082 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
18083 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
18084 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
18085 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
18086 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
18087 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
18088 working on the future release.</p>
18089
18090 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
18091 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
18092
18093       </div>
18094       <div class="tags">
18095
18096
18097         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
18098
18099
18100       </div>
18101     </div>
18102     <div class="padding"></div>
18103
18104     <div class="entry">
18105       <div class="title">
18106         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
18107       </div>
18108       <div class="date">
18109         24th June 2009
18110       </div>
18111       <div class="body">
18112         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
18113 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
18114 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
18115 funded
18116 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
18117 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
18118 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
18119 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
18120 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
18121 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
18122
18123 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
18124 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
18125 boot:</p>
18126
18127 <ul>
18128
18129 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
18130
18131 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
18132    clock is in UTC.</li>
18133
18134 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
18135    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
18136    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
18137
18138 </ul>
18139
18140 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
18141 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
18142 Villegas</a>.
18143
18144 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
18145 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
18146 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
18147 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
18148 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
18149 using this.</p>
18150
18151 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
18152 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
18153 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
18154 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
18155 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
18156 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
18157 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
18158
18159       </div>
18160       <div class="tags">
18161
18162
18163         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18164
18165
18166       </div>
18167     </div>
18168     <div class="padding"></div>
18169
18170     <div class="entry">
18171       <div class="title">
18172         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html">Two projects that have improved the quality of free software a lot</a>
18173       </div>
18174       <div class="date">
18175          2nd May 2009
18176       </div>
18177       <div class="body">
18178         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
18179 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
18180 do not yet know them.</p>
18181
18182 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
18183 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
18184 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
18185 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
18186 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
18187 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
18188 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
18189 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
18190 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
18191 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
18192 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
18193
18194 <p>The second one is
18195 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
18196 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
18197 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
18198 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
18199 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
18200 and the company behind it is running
18201 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
18202 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
18203 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
18204 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
18205 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
18206 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
18207 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
18208 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
18209
18210 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
18211 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
18212 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
18213 surrounded by today.</p>
18214
18215       </div>
18216       <div class="tags">
18217
18218
18219         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18220
18221
18222       </div>
18223     </div>
18224     <div class="padding"></div>
18225
18226     <div class="entry">
18227       <div class="title">
18228         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html">No patch is not better than a useless patch</a>
18229       </div>
18230       <div class="date">
18231         28th April 2009
18232       </div>
18233       <div class="body">
18234         <p>Julien Blache
18235 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
18236 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
18237 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
18238 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
18239 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
18240 properties.</p>
18241
18242       </div>
18243       <div class="tags">
18244
18245
18246         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
18247
18248
18249       </div>
18250     </div>
18251     <div class="padding"></div>
18252
18253     <div class="entry">
18254       <div class="title">
18255         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html">Recording video from cron using VLC</a>
18256       </div>
18257       <div class="date">
18258          5th April 2009
18259       </div>
18260       <div class="body">
18261         <p>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
18262 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net.  The
18263 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
18264 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
18265 vlc.  I finally found a way to do it today.  I spent an hour or so
18266 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation.  The
18267 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
18268 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:</p>
18269
18270 <blockquote><pre>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
18271 SAVEFILE=rms.ogg
18272 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
18273   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
18274   --intf=dummy</pre></blockquote>
18275
18276 <p>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
18277 duplicating the output stream to "nodisplay" and the file, using the
18278 dummy interface.  The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
18279 sure no X interface is needed.</p>
18280
18281 <p>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
18282 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
18283 the vlc process with SIGTERM.  Here is a complete script
18284 <tt>vlc-record</tt> to use from <tt>at</tt> or <tt>cron</tt>:</p>
18285
18286 <blockquote><pre>#!/bin/sh
18287 set -e
18288 URL="$1"
18289 SAVEFILE="$2"
18290 DURATION="$3"
18291 DISPLAY= vlc -q "$URL" \
18292   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
18293   --intf=dummy < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 &
18294 pid=$!
18295 sleep $DURATION
18296 kill $pid
18297 wait $pid</pre></blockquote>
18298
18299       </div>
18300       <div class="tags">
18301
18302
18303         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
18304
18305
18306       </div>
18307     </div>
18308     <div class="padding"></div>
18309
18310     <div class="entry">
18311       <div class="title">
18312         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html">Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</a>
18313       </div>
18314       <div class="date">
18315         30th March 2009
18316       </div>
18317       <div class="body">
18318         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
18319 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
18320 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
18321 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
18322 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
18323 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
18324 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
18325 application.</p>
18326
18327 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
18328 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
18329 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
18330 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
18331 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
18332 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
18333 blocked from doing so.</p>
18334
18335 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
18336 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
18337 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
18338 requirements change.</p>
18339
18340 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
18341 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
18342 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
18343
18344       </div>
18345       <div class="tags">
18346
18347
18348         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
18349
18350
18351       </div>
18352     </div>
18353     <div class="padding"></div>
18354
18355     <div class="entry">
18356       <div class="title">
18357         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
18358       </div>
18359       <div class="date">
18360         29th March 2009
18361       </div>
18362       <div class="body">
18363         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
18364 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
18365 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
18366 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
18367 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
18368 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
18369 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
18370 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
18371 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
18372 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
18373 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
18374 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
18375 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
18376 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
18377 now. :)</p>
18378
18379       </div>
18380       <div class="tags">
18381
18382
18383         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
18384
18385
18386       </div>
18387     </div>
18388     <div class="padding"></div>
18389
18390     <div class="entry">
18391       <div class="title">
18392         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">Time for new  LDAP schemas replacing RFC 2307?</a>
18393       </div>
18394       <div class="date">
18395         29th March 2009
18396       </div>
18397       <div class="body">
18398         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
18399 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
18400 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
18401 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
18402 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
18403 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
18404
18405 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
18406 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
18407 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
18408 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
18409 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
18410 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
18411 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
18412 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
18413 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
18414 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
18415 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
18416 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
18417 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
18418
18419 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
18420 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
18421 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
18422 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
18423
18424 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
18425 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
18426
18427 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
18428 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
18429 new IETF work group?</p>
18430
18431       </div>
18432       <div class="tags">
18433
18434
18435         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
18436
18437
18438       </div>
18439     </div>
18440     <div class="padding"></div>
18441
18442     <div class="entry">
18443       <div class="title">
18444         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">Checking server hardware support status for Dell, HP and IBM servers</a>
18445       </div>
18446       <div class="date">
18447         28th February 2009
18448       </div>
18449       <div class="body">
18450         <p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
18451 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
18452 contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
18453 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
18454 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
18455 each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
18456 status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
18457 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
18458 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
18459 machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
18460 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
18461 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
18462 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
18463 for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
18464 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
18465 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
18466 The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
18467 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
18468 them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
18469 using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
18470 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
18471 services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
18472 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
18473 them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
18474 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
18475 machine.</p>
18476
18477 <p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
18478 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
18479 Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
18480 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
18481 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
18482 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
18483 introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:</p>
18484
18485 <pre>
18486 use LWP::Simple;
18487 use POSIX;
18488 use WWW::Mechanize;
18489 use Date::Parse;
18490 [...]
18491 sub get_support_info {
18492     my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
18493     my $str;
18494
18495     if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
18496         # fetch website from Dell support
18497         my $url = "http://support.euro.dell.com/support/topics/topic.aspx/emea/shared/support/my_systems_info/no/details?c=no&amp;cs=nodhs1&amp;l=no&amp;s=dhs&amp;ServiceTag=$serial";
18498         my $webpage = get($url);
18499         return undef unless ($webpage);
18500
18501         my $daysleft = -1;
18502         my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
18503         foreach my $line (@lines) {
18504             next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
18505             $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
18506             $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
18507
18508             my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
18509             @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
18510             my $lastend = "";
18511             while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
18512                 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
18513
18514                 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
18515                                             localtime(str2time($startstr)));
18516                 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
18517                                           localtime(str2time($endstr)));
18518                 $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
18519                 @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
18520                 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
18521             }
18522             my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
18523             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
18524                 if ($lastend lt $today);
18525         }
18526     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
18527         my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
18528         my $url =
18529             'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
18530         $mech->get($url);
18531         my $fields = {
18532             'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
18533             'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
18534             'country' => 'NO',
18535             'productNumber' => $productnumber,
18536             'serialNumber1' => $serial,
18537         };
18538         $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
18539                             fields      => $fields );
18540         # Next step is screen scraping
18541         my $content = $mech->content();
18542
18543         $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
18544         $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
18545         $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
18546         $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
18547
18548         my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
18549
18550         while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
18551             my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
18552                 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
18553             $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
18554             my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
18555                                         localtime(str2time($startstr)));
18556             my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
18557                                       localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
18558
18559             $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
18560
18561             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
18562                 if ($end lt $today);
18563         }
18564     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
18565         # This code ignore extended support contracts.
18566         my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
18567         if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
18568             my $content =
18569                 get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
18570             if ($content) {
18571                 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
18572                 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
18573                 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
18574                 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
18575
18576                 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
18577                 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
18578
18579                 $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
18580
18581                 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
18582                 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
18583                     if ($end lt $today);
18584             }
18585         }
18586     }
18587     return $str;
18588 }
18589 </pre>
18590
18591 <p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
18592 serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
18593 from dmidecode.</p>
18594
18595 <pre>
18596 print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
18597                        "447707-B21");
18598 print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
18599 print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
18600                        "1234567");
18601 </pre>
18602
18603 <p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
18604 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
18605
18606 <p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
18607 contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
18608 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
18609 do so.</p>
18610
18611       </div>
18612       <div class="tags">
18613
18614
18615         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
18616
18617
18618       </div>
18619     </div>
18620     <div class="padding"></div>
18621
18622     <div class="entry">
18623       <div class="title">
18624         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html">Using bar codes at a computing center</a>
18625       </div>
18626       <div class="date">
18627         20th February 2009
18628       </div>
18629       <div class="body">
18630         <p>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
18631 in our computing center.  This give us a challenge in tracking the
18632 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
18633 removed.  Some times the location register is not updated when a
18634 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
18635 the "missing" computer.</p>
18636
18637 <p>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
18638 <a href="http://www.libdmtx.org/">libdmtx</a> to write and read bar
18639 code blocks as defined in the
18640 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix">The Data Matrix
18641 Standard</a>.  This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
18642 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
18643 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture.  The bar code standard
18644 allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag.  There is another project
18645 with <a href="http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/">a bar code
18646 writer written in postscript</a> capable of creating such bar codes,
18647 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
18648 codes.</p>
18649
18650 <p>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
18651 machines in our computing center.  If both racks and computers are
18652 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
18653 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
18654 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
18655 locations, and can detect movements and removals.</p>
18656
18657 <p>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
18658 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names.  Next, I
18659 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
18660 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read.  This worked
18661 fairly well.  If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
18662 side, all tags in the image could be read.  Because of limited space
18663 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
18664 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
18665 about half the rack.  I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
18666 to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.</p>
18667
18668 <p>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
18669 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
18670 easier automatic tracking of computers.</p>
18671
18672       </div>
18673       <div class="tags">
18674
18675
18676         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
18677
18678
18679       </div>
18680     </div>
18681     <div class="padding"></div>
18682
18683     <div class="entry">
18684       <div class="title">
18685         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/When_web_browser_developers_make_a_video_player___.html">When web browser developers make a video player...</a>
18686       </div>
18687       <div class="date">
18688         17th January 2009
18689       </div>
18690       <div class="body">
18691         <p>As part of the work we do in <a href="http://www.nuug.no">NUUG</a>
18692 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
18693 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
18694 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
18695 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
18696 will become easier when the &lt;video&gt; tag is implemented in all
18697 browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
18698 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
18699 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
18700 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
18701 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
18702 &lt;video&gt; tag, the &lt;object&gt; tag, the &lt;embed&gt; tag and
18703 the &lt;applet&gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
18704 finding the best options is a major challenge.</p>
18705
18706 <p>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from <a
18707 href="http://labs.opera.com">labs.opera.com</a>, to see how it handled
18708 a &lt;video&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
18709 I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
18710 from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
18711 definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
18712 instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
18713 of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
18714 for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
18715 is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
18716 download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
18717 discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
18718 to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
18719 autoplay="true" did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
18720 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
18721 &lt;video&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
18722 playing when the download is done.</p>
18723
18724 <p>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
18725 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/">available
18726 from the nuug site</a>.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
18727 too.</p>
18728
18729 <p>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
18730 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
18731 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
18732 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)</p>
18733
18734       </div>
18735       <div class="tags">
18736
18737
18738         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
18739
18740
18741       </div>
18742     </div>
18743     <div class="padding"></div>
18744
18745     <div class="entry">
18746       <div class="title">
18747         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html">Software video mixer on a USB stick</a>
18748       </div>
18749       <div class="date">
18750         28th December 2008
18751       </div>
18752       <div class="body">
18753         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> is
18754 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
18755 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
18756 directly with the video stream.  For this, we use the
18757 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/">dvswitch</a> package from
18758 the Debian video team.  As this require quite one computer per video
18759 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
18760 borrow laptops.  And to avoid having to install extra software on
18761 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
18762 bootable USB stick.  The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
18763 source, sink and mixer applications and
18764 <a href="http://www.kinodv.org/">dvgrab</a>.  To allow this setup to
18765 work without any configuration, I've patched dvswitch to use
18766 <a href="http://www.avahi.org/">avahi</a> to connect the various parts
18767 together.  And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
18768 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
18769 with USB sources.  We have not yet tested this setup in a production
18770 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
18771 video mixer in a very short time frame.  We will need it for
18772 <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go Open 2009</a>.</p>
18773
18774 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz">The
18775 USB image</a> is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
18776 larger stick as well.</p>
18777
18778       </div>
18779       <div class="tags">
18780
18781
18782         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
18783
18784
18785       </div>
18786     </div>
18787     <div class="padding"></div>
18788
18789     <div class="entry">
18790       <div class="title">
18791         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html">Devcamp brought us closer to the Lenny based Debian Edu release</a>
18792       </div>
18793       <div class="date">
18794          7th December 2008
18795       </div>
18796       <div class="body">
18797         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
18798 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
18799 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
18800 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
18801 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
18802 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
18803 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
18804 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
18805
18806 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
18807 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
18808 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
18809 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
18810 of these cards.</p>
18811
18812       </div>
18813       <div class="tags">
18814
18815
18816         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp</a>.
18817
18818
18819       </div>
18820     </div>
18821     <div class="padding"></div>
18822
18823     <div class="entry">
18824       <div class="title">
18825         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html">The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian</a>
18826       </div>
18827       <div class="date">
18828         25th November 2008
18829       </div>
18830       <div class="body">
18831         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
18832 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
18833 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
18834 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
18835 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
18836 notes are available on
18837 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
18838 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
18839 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
18840 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
18841 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
18842 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
18843 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
18844 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
18845 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
18846
18847 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
18848 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
18849
18850       </div>
18851       <div class="tags">
18852
18853
18854         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
18855
18856
18857       </div>
18858     </div>
18859     <div class="padding"></div>
18860
18861     <p style="text-align: right;"><a href="english.rss"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/xml.gif" alt="RSS Feed" width="36" height="14" /></a></p>
18862     <div id="sidebar">
18863
18864
18865
18866 <h2>Archive</h2>
18867 <ul>
18868
18869 <li>2014
18870 <ul>
18871
18872 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
18873
18874 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (2)</a></li>
18875
18876 </ul></li>
18877
18878 <li>2013
18879 <ul>
18880
18881 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
18882
18883 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
18884
18885 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
18886
18887 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
18888
18889 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
18890
18891 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
18892
18893 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
18894
18895 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
18896
18897 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
18898
18899 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
18900
18901 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
18902
18903 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
18904
18905 </ul></li>
18906
18907 <li>2012
18908 <ul>
18909
18910 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
18911
18912 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
18913
18914 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
18915
18916 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
18917
18918 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
18919
18920 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
18921
18922 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
18923
18924 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
18925
18926 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
18927
18928 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
18929
18930 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
18931
18932 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
18933
18934 </ul></li>
18935
18936 <li>2011
18937 <ul>
18938
18939 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
18940
18941 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
18942
18943 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
18944
18945 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
18946
18947 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
18948
18949 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
18950
18951 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
18952
18953 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
18954
18955 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
18956
18957 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
18958
18959 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
18960
18961 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
18962
18963 </ul></li>
18964
18965 <li>2010
18966 <ul>
18967
18968 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
18969
18970 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
18971
18972 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
18973
18974 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
18975
18976 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
18977
18978 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
18979
18980 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
18981
18982 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
18983
18984 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
18985
18986 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
18987
18988 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
18989
18990 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
18991
18992 </ul></li>
18993
18994 <li>2009
18995 <ul>
18996
18997 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
18998
18999 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
19000
19001 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
19002
19003 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
19004
19005 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
19006
19007 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
19008
19009 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
19010
19011 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
19012
19013 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
19014
19015 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
19016
19017 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
19018
19019 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
19020
19021 </ul></li>
19022
19023 <li>2008
19024 <ul>
19025
19026 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
19027
19028 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
19029
19030 </ul></li>
19031
19032 </ul>
19033
19034
19035
19036 <h2>Tags</h2>
19037 <ul>
19038
19039  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (13)</a></li>
19040
19041  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
19042
19043  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
19044
19045  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
19046
19047  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (8)</a></li>
19048
19049  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (14)</a></li>
19050
19051  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
19052
19053  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
19054
19055  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (94)</a></li>
19056
19057  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (144)</a></li>
19058
19059  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
19060
19061  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (10)</a></li>
19062
19063  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
19064
19065  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (236)</a></li>
19066
19067  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (21)</a></li>
19068
19069  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (12)</a></li>
19070
19071  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (12)</a></li>
19072
19073  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (5)</a></li>
19074
19075  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (11)</a></li>
19076
19077  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (39)</a></li>
19078
19079  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (7)</a></li>
19080
19081  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (18)</a></li>
19082
19083  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (8)</a></li>
19084
19085  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (6)</a></li>
19086
19087  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
19088
19089  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (7)</a></li>
19090
19091  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (25)</a></li>
19092
19093  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (239)</a></li>
19094
19095  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (161)</a></li>
19096
19097  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (9)</a></li>
19098
19099  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
19100
19101  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (45)</a></li>
19102
19103  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (68)</a></li>
19104
19105  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (1)</a></li>
19106
19107  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
19108
19109  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (2)</a></li>
19110
19111  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (9)</a></li>
19112
19113  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
19114
19115  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (4)</a></li>
19116
19117  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
19118
19119  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (34)</a></li>
19120
19121  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
19122
19123  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (4)</a></li>
19124
19125  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (44)</a></li>
19126
19127  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (3)</a></li>
19128
19129  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (9)</a></li>
19130
19131  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (21)</a></li>
19132
19133  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (1)</a></li>
19134
19135  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (8)</a></li>
19136
19137  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (39)</a></li>
19138
19139  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
19140
19141  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (28)</a></li>
19142
19143 </ul>
19144
19145
19146     </div>
19147     <p style="text-align: right">
19148  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
19149 </p>
19150
19151   </body>
19152 </html>