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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/Sales_number_for_the_Free_Culture_translation__first_half_of_2016.html">Sales number for the Free Culture translation, first half of 2016</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28          5th August 2016
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>As my regular readers probably remember, the last year I published
  32 a French and Norwegian translation of the classic
  33 <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture book</a> by the
  34 founder of the Creative Commons movement, Lawrence Lessig.  A bit less
  35 known is the fact that due to the way I created the translations,
  36 using docbook and po4a, I also recreated the English original.  And
  37 because I already had created a new the PDF edition, I published it
  38 too.  The revenue from the books are sent to the Creative Commons
  39 Corporation.  In other words, I do not earn any money from this
  40 project, I just earn the warm fuzzy feeling that the text is available
  41 for a wider audience and more people can learn why the Creative
  42 Commons is needed.</p>
  43
  44 <p>Today, just for fun, I had a look at the sales number over at
  45 Lulu.com, which take care of payment, printing and shipping.  Much to
  46 my surprise, the English edition is selling better than both the
  47 French and Norwegian edition, despite the fact that it has been
  48 available in English since it was first published.  In total, 24 paper
  49 books was sold for USD $19.99 between 2016-01-01 and 2016-07-31:</p>
  50
  51 <table border="0">
  52 <tr><th>Title / language</th><th>Quantity</th></tr>
  53 <tr><td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Culture Libre / French</a></td><td>3</td></tr>
  54 <tr><td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Fri kultur / Norwegian</a></td><td>7</td></tr>
  55 <tr><td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">Free Culture / English</a></td><td>14</td></tr>
  56 </table>
  57
  58 <p>The books are available both from Lulu.com and from large book
  59 stores like Amazon and Barnes&Noble.  Most revenue, around $10 per
  60 book, is sent to the Creative Commons project when the book is sold
  61 directly by Lulu.com.  The other channels give less revenue.  The
  62 summary from Lulu tell me 10 books was sold via the Amazon channel, 10
  63 via Ingram (what is this?) and 4 directly by Lulu.  And Lulu.com tells
  64 me that the revenue sent so far this year is USD $101.42.  No idea
  65 what kind of sales numbers to expect, so I do not know if that is a
  66 good amount of sales for a 10 year old book or not.  But it make me
  67 happy that the buyers find the book, and I hope they enjoy reading it
  68 as much as I did.</p>
  69
  70 <p>The ebook edition is available for free from
  71 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Github</a>.</p>
  72
  73 <p>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
  74 language, I would be happy to help make it happen.  Please get in
  75 touch.</p>
  76
  77       </div>
  78       <div class="tags">
  79
  80
  81         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>.
  82
  83
  84       </div>
  85     </div>
  86     <div class="padding"></div>
  87
  88     <div class="entry">
  89       <div class="title">
  90         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Techno_TV_broadcasting_live_across_Norway_and_the_Internet___debconf16___nuug__on__frikanalen.html">Techno TV broadcasting live across Norway and the Internet (#debconf16, #nuug) on @frikanalen</a>
  91       </div>
  92       <div class="date">
  93          1st August 2016
  94       </div>
  95       <div class="body">
  96         <p>Did you know there is a TV channel broadcasting talks from DebConf
  97 16 across an entire country?  Or that there is a TV channel
  98 broadcasting talks by or about
  99 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625529/">Linus Torvalds</a>,
 100 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625599/">Tor</a>,
 101 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/624019/">OpenID</A>,
 102 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625624/">Common Lisp</a>,
 103 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625446/">Civic Tech</a>,
 104 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625090/">EFF founder John Barlow</a>,
 105 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625432/">how to make 3D
 106 printer electronics</a> and many more fascinating topics?  It works
 107 using only free software (all of it
 108 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from Github</a>), and
 109 is administrated using a web browser and a web API.</p>
 110
 111 <p>The TV channel is the Norwegian open channel
 112 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, and I am involved
 113 via <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG member association</a> in
 114 running and developing the software for the channel.  The channel is
 115 organised as a member organisation where its members can upload and
 116 broadcast what they want (think of it as Youtube for national
 117 broadcasting television).  Individuals can broadcast too.  The time
 118 slots are handled on a first come, first serve basis.  Because the
 119 channel have almost no viewers and very few active members, we can
 120 experiment with TV technology without too much flack when we make
 121 mistakes.  And thanks to the few active members, most of the slots on
 122 the schedule are free.  I see this as an opportunity to spread
 123 knowledge about technology and free software, and have a script I run
 124 regularly to fill up all the open slots the next few days with
 125 technology related video.  The end result is a channel I like to
 126 describe as Techno TV - filled with interesting talks and
 127 presentations.</p>
 128
 129 <p>It is available on channel 50 on the Norwegian national digital TV
 130 network (RiksTV).  It is also available as a multicast stream on
 131 Uninett.  And finally, it is available as
 132 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/">a WebM unicast stream</a> from
 133 Frikanalen and NUUG.  Check it out. :)</p>
 134
 135       </div>
 136       <div class="tags">
 137
 138
 139         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>.
 140
 141
 142       </div>
 143     </div>
 144     <div class="padding"></div>
 145
 146     <div class="entry">
 147       <div class="title">
 148         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlocking_HTC_Desire_HD_on_Linux_using_unruu_and_fastboot.html">Unlocking HTC Desire HD on Linux using unruu and fastboot</a>
 149       </div>
 150       <div class="date">
 151          7th July 2016
 152       </div>
 153       <div class="body">
 154         <p>Yesterday, I tried to unlock a HTC Desire HD phone, and it proved
 155 to be a slight challenge.  Here is the recipe if I ever need to do it
 156 again.  It all started by me wanting to try the recipe to set up
 157 <a href="https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy">an
 158 hardened Android installation</a> from the Tor project blog on a
 159 device I had access to.  It is a old mobile phone with a broken
 160 microphone The initial idea had been to just
 161 <a href="http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_ace">install
 162 CyanogenMod on it</a>, but did not quite find time to start on it
 163 until a few days ago.</p>
 164
 165 <p>The unlock process is supposed to be simple: (1) Boot into the boot
 166 loader (press volume down and power at the same time), (2) select
 167 'fastboot' before (3) connecting the device via USB to a Linux
 168 machine, (4) request the device identifier token by running 'fastboot
 169 oem get_identifier_token', (5) request the device unlocking key using
 170 the <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader/">HTC developer web
 171 site</a> and unlock the phone using the key file emailed to you.</p>
 172
 173 <p>Unfortunately, this only work fi you have hboot version 2.00.0029
 174 or newer, and the device I was working on had 2.00.0027.  This
 175 apparently can be easily fixed by downloading a Windows program and
 176 running it on your Windows machine, if you accept the terms Microsoft
 177 require you to accept to use Windows - which I do not.  So I had to
 178 come up with a different approach.  I got a lot of help from AndyCap
 179 on #nuug, and would not have been able to get this working without
 180 him.</p>
 181
 182 <p>First I needed to extract the hboot firmware from
 183 <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/ruu/PD9810000_Ace_Sense30_S_hboot_2.00.0029.exe">the
 184 windows binary for HTC Desire HD</a> downloaded as 'the RUU' from HTC.
 185 For this there is is <a href="https://github.com/kmdm/unruu/">a github
 186 project named unruu</a> using libunshield.  The unshield tool did not
 187 recognise the file format, but unruu worked and extracted rom.zip,
 188 containing the new hboot firmware and a text file describing which
 189 devices it would work for.</p>
 190
 191 <p>Next, I needed to get the new firmware into the device.  For this I
 192 followed some instructions
 193 <a href="http://www.htc1guru.com/2013/09/new-ruu-zips-posted/">available
 194 from HTC1Guru.com</a>, and ran these commands as root on a Linux
 195 machine with Debian testing:</p>
 196
 197 <p><pre>
 198 adb reboot-bootloader
 199 fastboot oem rebootRUU
 200 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
 201 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
 202 fastboot reboot
 203 </pre></p>
 204
 205 <p>The flash command apparently need to be done twice to take effect,
 206 as the first is just preparations and the second one do the flashing.
 207 The adb command is just to get to the boot loader menu, so turning the
 208 device on while holding volume down and the power button should work
 209 too.</p>
 210
 211 <p>With the new hboot version in place I could start following the
 212 instructions on the HTC developer web site.  I got the device token
 213 like this:</p>
 214
 215 <p><pre>
 216 fastboot oem get_identifier_token 2>&1 | sed 's/(bootloader) //'
 217 </pre>
 218
 219 <p>And once I got the unlock code via email, I could use it like
 220 this:</p>
 221
 222 <p><pre>
 223 fastboot flash unlocktoken Unlock_code.bin
 224 </pre></p>
 225
 226 <p>And with that final step in place, the phone was unlocked and I
 227 could start stuffing the software of my own choosing into the device.
 228 So far I only inserted a replacement recovery image to wipe the phone
 229 before I start.  We will see what happen next.  Perhaps I should
 230 install <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> on it. :)</p>
 231
 232       </div>
 233       <div class="tags">
 234
 235
 236         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
 237
 238
 239       </div>
 240     </div>
 241     <div class="padding"></div>
 242
 243     <div class="entry">
 244       <div class="title">
 245         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html">How to use the Signal app if you only have a land line (ie no mobile phone)</a>
 246       </div>
 247       <div class="date">
 248          3rd July 2016
 249       </div>
 250       <div class="body">
 251         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to test
 252 <a href="https://whispersystems.org/">the Signal app</a>, as it is
 253 said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my
 254 friends and family are already using it.  As I by choice do not own a
 255 mobile phone, this proved to be harder than expected.  And I wanted to
 256 have the source of the client and know that it was the code used on my
 257 machine.  But yesterday I managed to get it working.  I used the
 258 Github source, compared it to the source in
 259 <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/signal-private-messenger/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk?hl=en-US">the
 260 Signal Chrome app</a> available from the Chrome web store, applied
 261 patches to use the production Signal servers, started the app and
 262 asked for the hidden "register without a smart phone" form.  Here is
 263 the recipe how I did it.</p>
 264
 265 <p>First, I fetched the Signal desktop source from Github, using
 266
 267 <pre>
 268 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
 269 </pre>
 270
 271 <p>Next, I patched the source to use the production servers, to be
 272 able to talk to other Signal users:</p>
 273
 274 <pre>
 275 cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p0
 276 diff -ur ./js/background.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js
 277 --- ./js/background.js  2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
 278 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js    2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
 279 @@ -47,8 +47,8 @@
 280          });
 281      });
 282
 283 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
 284 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
 285 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org:4433';
 286 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
 287      var messageReceiver;
 288      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
 289          if (messageReceiver) {
 290 diff -ur ./js/expire.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js
 291 --- ./js/expire.js      2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
 292 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
 293 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 294  ;(function() {
 295      'use strict';
 296 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
 297 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 1474492690000;
 298
 299      window.extension = window.extension || {};
 300
 301 EOF
 302 </pre>
 303
 304 <p>The first part is changing the servers, and the second is updating
 305 an expiration timestamp.  This timestamp need to be updated regularly.
 306 It is set 90 days in the future by the build process (Gruntfile.js).
 307 The value is seconds since 1970 times 1000, as far as I can tell.</p>
 308
 309 <p>Based on a tip and good help from the #nuug IRC channel, I wrote a
 310 script to launch Signal in Chromium.</p>
 311
 312 <pre>
 313 #!/bin/sh
 314 cd $(dirname $0)
 315 mkdir -p userdata
 316 exec chromium \
 317   --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
 318   --user-data-dir=`pwd`/userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
 319 </pre>
 320
 321 <p> The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor
 322 SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today
 323 Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines
 324 will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal
 325 connections if they use source IP address.</p>
 326
 327 <p>When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under
 328 "Standalone Registration" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git
 329 repository.  I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the
 330 Chromium debugging tool, visited the 'Console' tab and wrote
 331 'extension.install("standalone")' on the console prompt to get the
 332 registration form.  Then I entered by land line phone number and
 333 pressed 'Call'.  5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice
 334 repeated the verification code three times.  After entering the number
 335 into the verification code field in the form, I could start using
 336 Signal from my laptop.
 337
 338 <p>As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to
 339 whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server,
 340 but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server
 341 setup.  It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the
 342 content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data
 343 exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know.
 344 So better than many options, but not great.  And sadly the usage is
 345 connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server
 346 to associate it to my home and person.  I would prefer it if only
 347 those I knew could tell who I was on Signal.  There are options
 348 avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not
 349 using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.</p>
 350
 351       </div>
 352       <div class="tags">
 353
 354
 355         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 356
 357
 358       </div>
 359     </div>
 360     <div class="padding"></div>
 361
 362     <div class="entry">
 363       <div class="title">
 364         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?</a>
 365       </div>
 366       <div class="date">
 367          6th June 2016
 368       </div>
 369       <div class="body">
 370         <p>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
 371 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">which
 372 multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
 373 MIME types</a>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
 374 the various players claimed support for.  The range was from 55 to 130
 375 MIME types.  I suspect most media formats are supported by all
 376 players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
 377 their desktop files.  There are probably also some bogus MIME types
 378 listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.</p>
 379
 380 <p>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
 381 the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
 382 and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
 383 favorite media player VLC.  The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
 384 yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
 385 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">Multimedia
 386 player MIME type support status</a> Debian wiki page.</p>
 387
 388 <p>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?  It is VLC, followed by
 389 totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
 390 kmplayer.  I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
 391 several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
 392 toten and parole.</p>
 393
 394 <p>A sad observation is that only 14 MIME types are listed as
 395 supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
 396 desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
 397 audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
 398 video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
 399 video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo.  Personally I find
 400 it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
 401 players in Debian.  As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
 402 formats.</p>
 403
 404       </div>
 405       <div class="tags">
 406
 407
 408         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>.
 409
 410
 411       </div>
 412     </div>
 413     <div class="padding"></div>
 414
 415     <div class="entry">
 416       <div class="title">
 417         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html">A program should be able to open its own files on Linux</a>
 418       </div>
 419       <div class="date">
 420          5th June 2016
 421       </div>
 422       <div class="body">
 423         <p>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
 424 decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
 425 talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine.  I
 426 wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
 427 the day before I would give the talk.  The next day I took a plane to
 428 the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
 429 started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
 430 that kpresenter refused to load its own data file.  I cursed a bit and
 431 started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
 432 present when I arrived.  I tested that the saved files could be
 433 loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued.  I continued to polish the
 434 slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
 435 be loaded into kpresenter.  In the end I had to rewrite the slides
 436 three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
 437 shorter.  After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem &ndash;
 438 kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
 439 Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
 440 program to make slides.  The point I'm trying to make is that we
 441 expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
 442 embarrassing to its developers if it can't.</p>
 443
 444 <p>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
 445 files from the desktop file browser?  It is not a uncommon problem.  A
 446 while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
 447 gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
 448 browser would refuse to open.  No video player claimed to understand
 449 such file.  I tracked down the cause being <tt>file --mime-type</tt>
 450 returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
 451 installed listed as a MIME type they would understand.  I asked for
 452 <a href="http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=382">file to change its
 453 behavour</a> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead.  I also asked
 454 several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
 455 the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files.  After a
 456 while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
 457 output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.</p>
 458
 459 <p>But history repeats itself.  A few days ago I tested the music
 460 system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
 461 browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
 462 (*.rg).  I've reported <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/825993">the
 463 rosegarden problem to BTS</a> and a fix is commited to git and will be
 464 included in the next upload.  To increase the chance of me remembering
 465 how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
 466 from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.</p>
 467
 468 <p>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
 469 There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file.  The output from
 470 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> mentioned above, and the content of the
 471 shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/).  The file MIME
 472 type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
 473 information is collected from
 474 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/">the
 475 desktop files</a> available in /usr/share/applications/.  If there is
 476 one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
 477 activated when asking to open a given file.  If there are more, one
 478 can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
 479 selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar.  In general
 480 this work well.  But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
 481 type (preferably
 482 <a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">a
 483 MIME type registered with IANA</a>), file and/or the shared MIME
 484 registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
 485 type in its list of supported MIME types.</p>
 486
 487 <p>The <tt>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml</tt> entry for
 488 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec">the
 489 Shared MIME database</a> look like this:</p>
 490
 491 <p><blockquote><pre>
 492 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
 493 &lt;mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"&gt;
 494   &lt;mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden"&gt;
 495     &lt;sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/&gt;
 496     &lt;comment&gt;Rosegarden project file&lt;/comment&gt;
 497     &lt;glob pattern="*.rg"/&gt;
 498   &lt;/mime-type&gt;
 499 &lt;/mime-info&gt;
 500 </pre></blockquote></p>
 501
 502 <p>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
 503 (it is a gzipped XML file).  Note, it is much better to use an
 504 official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
 505 unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.</p>
 506
 507 <p>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
 508 audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
 509 file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:</p>
 510
 511 <p><blockquote><pre>
 512 % grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
 513 MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
 514 X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
 515 %
 516 </pre></blockquote></p>
 517
 518 <p>The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the
 519 MimeType= line.</p>
 520
 521 <p>If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when
 522 selected from the file browser, please check out the output from
 523 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> for the file, ensure the file ending and
 524 MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check
 525 that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming
 526 support for this MIME type.  If not, please report a bug to have it
 527 fixed. :)</p>
 528
 529       </div>
 530       <div class="tags">
 531
 532
 533         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>.
 534
 535
 536       </div>
 537     </div>
 538     <div class="padding"></div>
 539
 540     <div class="entry">
 541       <div class="title">
 542         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Tor___from_its_creators_mouth_11_years_ago.html">Tor - from its creators mouth 11 years ago</a>
 543       </div>
 544       <div class="date">
 545         28th May 2016
 546       </div>
 547       <div class="body">
 548         <p>A little more than 11 years ago, one of the creators of Tor, and
 549 the current President of <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">the Tor
 550 project</a>, Roger Dingledine, gave a talk for the members of the
 551 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group</a> (NUUG).  A
 552 video of the talk was recorded, and today, thanks to the great help
 553 from David Noble, I finally was able to publish the video of the talk
 554 on Frikanalen, the Norwegian open channel TV station where NUUG
 555 currently publishes its talks.  You can
 556 <a href="http://frikanalen.no/se">watch the live stream using a web
 557 browser</a> with WebM support, or check out the recording on the video
 558 on demand page for the talk
 559 "<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625599">Tor: Anonymous
 560 communication for the US Department of Defence...and you.</a>".</p>
 561
 562 <p>Here is the video included for those of you using browsers with
 563 HTML video and Ogg Theora support:</p>
 564
 565 <p><video width="70%" poster="http://simula.gunkies.org/media/625599/large_thumb/20050421-tor-frikanalen.jpg" controls>
 566   <source src="http://simula.gunkies.org/media/625599/theora/20050421-tor-frikanalen.ogv" type="video/ogg"/>
 567 </video></p>
 568
 569 <p>I guess the gist of the talk can be summarised quite simply: If you
 570 want to help the military in USA (and everyone else), use Tor. :)</p>
 571
 572       </div>
 573       <div class="tags">
 574
 575
 576         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>.
 577
 578
 579       </div>
 580     </div>
 581     <div class="padding"></div>
 582
 583     <div class="entry">
 584       <div class="title">
 585         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_with_PackageKit_support___new_version_0_23_available_in_Debian_unstable.html">Isenkram with PackageKit support - new version 0.23 available in Debian unstable</a>
 586       </div>
 587       <div class="date">
 588         25th May 2016
 589       </div>
 590       <div class="body">
 591         <p><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">The isenkram
 592 system</a> is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware
 593 related packages.  The idea is to have a database of mappings between
 594 hardware and packages, and pop up a dialog suggesting for the user to
 595 install the packages to use a given hardware dongle.  Some use cases
 596 are when you insert a Yubikey, it proposes to install the software
 597 needed to control it; when you insert a braille reader list it
 598 proposes to install the packages needed to send text to the reader;
 599 and when you insert a ColorHug screen calibrator it suggests to
 600 install the driver for it.  The system work well, and even have a few
 601 command line tools to install firmware packages and packages for the
 602 hardware already in the machine (as opposed to hotpluggable hardware).</p>
 603
 604 <p>The system was initially written using aptdaemon, because I found
 605 good documentation and example code on how to use it.  But aptdaemon
 606 is going away and is generally being replaced by
 607 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/">PackageKit</a>,
 608 so Isenkram needed a rewrite.  And today, thanks to the great patch
 609 from my college Sunil Mohan Adapa in the FreedomBox project, the
 610 rewrite finally took place.  I've just uploaded a new version of
 611 Isenkram into Debian Unstable with the patch included, and the default
 612 for the background daemon is now to use PackageKit.  To check it out,
 613 install the <tt>isenkram</tt> package and insert some hardware dongle
 614 and see if it is recognised.</p>
 615
 616 <p>If you want to know what kind of packages isenkram would propose for
 617 the machine it is running on, you can check out the isenkram-lookup
 618 program.  This is what it look like on a Thinkpad X230:</p>
 619
 620 <p><blockquote><pre>
 621 % isenkram-lookup
 622 bluez
 623 cheese
 624 fprintd
 625 fprintd-demo
 626 gkrellm-thinkbat
 627 hdapsd
 628 libpam-fprintd
 629 pidgin-blinklight
 630 thinkfan
 631 tleds
 632 tp-smapi-dkms
 633 tp-smapi-source
 634 tpb
 635 %p
 636 </pre></blockquote></p>
 637
 638 <p>The hardware mappings come from several places.  The preferred way
 639 is for packages to announce their hardware support using
 640 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
 641 cross distribution appstream system</a>.
 642 See
 643 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">previous
 644 blog posts about isenkram</a> to learn how to do that.</p>
 645
 646       </div>
 647       <div class="tags">
 648
 649
 650         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>.
 651
 652
 653       </div>
 654     </div>
 655     <div class="padding"></div>
 656
 657     <div class="entry">
 658       <div class="title">
 659         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Discharge_rate_estimate_in_new_battery_statistics_collector_for_Debian.html">Discharge rate estimate in new battery statistics collector for Debian</a>
 660       </div>
 661       <div class="date">
 662         23rd May 2016
 663       </div>
 664       <div class="body">
 665         <p>Yesterday I updated the
 666 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats
 667 package in Debian</a> with a few patches sent to me by skilled and
 668 enterprising users.  There were some nice user and visible changes.
 669 First of all, both desktop menu entries now work.  A design flaw in
 670 one of the script made the history graph fail to show up (its PNG was
 671 dumped in ~/.xsession-errors) if no controlling TTY was available.
 672 The script worked when called from the command line, but not when
 673 called from the desktop menu.  I changed this to look for a DISPLAY
 674 variable or a TTY before deciding where to draw the graph, and now the
 675 graph window pop up as expected.</p>
 676
 677 <p>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
 678 graphs (the one showing the last few hours).  New is also the user of
 679 colours showing charging in blue and discharge in red.  The percentages
 680 of this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
 681 capacity.</p>
 682
 683 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-rate.png"/></p>
 684
 685 <p>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
 686 statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to
 687 visualise how the battery life time get shorter over time.  The red
 688 line in this graph is what the previous graph considers 100 percent:
 689
 690 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-history.png"/></p>
 691
 692 <p>In this graph you can see that I only charge the battery to 80
 693 percent of last full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is
 694 shrinking. :(</p>
 695
 696 <p>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle
 697 more hardware models.  On some hardware, Linux power supply
 698 information is stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the
 699 collector previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/.  Now
 700 both are checked to figure if there is power connected to the
 701 machine.</p>
 702
 703 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
 704 check out the
 705 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
 706 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
 707 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from <a
 708 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
 709 Patches are very welcome.</p>
 710
 711 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 712 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 713 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 714
 715       </div>
 716       <div class="tags">
 717
 718
 719         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>.
 720
 721
 722       </div>
 723     </div>
 724     <div class="padding"></div>
 725
 726     <div class="entry">
 727       <div class="title">
 728         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_edition_of_Lawrence_Lessigs_book_Cultura_Libre_on_Amazon_and_Barnes___Noble.html">French edition of Lawrence Lessigs book Cultura Libre on Amazon and Barnes & Noble</a>
 729       </div>
 730       <div class="date">
 731         21st May 2016
 732       </div>
 733       <div class="body">
 734         <p>A few weeks ago the French paperback edition of Lawrence Lessigs
 735 2004 book Cultura Libre was published.  Today I noticed that the book
 736 is now available from book stores.  You can now buy it from
 737 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Libre-French-Lawrence-Lessig/dp/8269018260">Amazon</a>
 738 ($19.99),
 739 <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/culture-libre-lawrence-lessig/1123776705">Barnes
 740 & Noble</a> ($?) and as always from
 741 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Lulu.com</a>
 742 ($19.99).  The revenue is donated to the Creative Commons project.  If
 743 you buy from Lulu.com, they currently get $10.59, while if you buy
 744 from one of the book stores most of the revenue go to the book store
 745 and the Creative Commons project get much (not sure how much
 746 less).</p>
 747
 748 <p>I was a bit surprised to discover that there is a kindle edition
 749 sold by Amazon Digital Services LLC on Amazon.  Not quite sure how
 750 that edition was created, but if you want to download a electronic
 751 edition (PDF, EPUB, Mobi) generated from the same files used to create
 752 the paperback edition, they are
 753 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">available
 754 from github</a>.</p>
 755
 756       </div>
 757       <div class="tags">
 758
 759
 760         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>.
 761
 762
 763       </div>
 764     </div>
 765     <div class="padding"></div>
 766
 767     <div class="entry">
 768       <div class="title">
 769         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_want_the_courts_to_be_involved_before_the_police_can_hijack_a_news_site_DNS_domain___domstolkontroll_.html">I want the courts to be involved before the police can hijack a news site DNS domain (#domstolkontroll)</a>
 770       </div>
 771       <div class="date">
 772         19th May 2016
 773       </div>
 774       <div class="body">
 775         <p>I just donated to the
 776 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">NUUG defence
 777 "fond"</a> to fund the effort in Norway to get the seizure of the news
 778 site popcorn-time.no tested in court.  I hope everyone that agree with
 779 me will do the same.</p>
 780
 781 <p>Would you be worried if you knew the police in your country could
 782 hijack DNS domains of news sites covering free software system without
 783 talking to a judge first?  I am.  What if the free software system
 784 combined search engine lookups, bittorrent downloads and video playout
 785 and was called Popcorn Time?  Would that affect your view?  It still
 786 make me worried.</p>
 787
 788 <p>In March 2016, the Norwegian police seized (as in forced NORID to
 789 change the IP address pointed to by it to one controlled by the
 790 police) the DNS domain popcorn-time.no, without any supervision from
 791 the courts.  I did not know about the web site back then, and assumed
 792 the courts had been involved, and was very surprised when I discovered
 793 that the police had hijacked the DNS domain without asking a judge for
 794 permission first.  I was even more surprised when I had a look at
 795 <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://popcorn-time.no">the web
 796 site content on the Internet Archive</A>, and only found news coverage
 797 about Popcorn Time, not any material published without the right
 798 holders permissions.</p>
 799
 800 <p>The seizure was widely covered in the Norwegian press (see for
 801 example <a href="http://www.hegnar.no/Nyheter/Naeringsliv/2016/03/Popcorn-time.no-beslaglagt-av-OEkokrim">Hegnar Online</a> and
 802 <a href="http://itavisen.no/2016/03/08/okokrim-har-beslaglagt-popcorn-time-no/">ITavisen<a/>
 803 and
 804 <a href="http://www.nrk.no/kultur/okokrim-gar-til-aksjon-mot-popcorn-time-1.12842452">NRK</a>),
 805 at first due to the press release sent out by Økokrim, but then based
 806 on
 807 <a href="http://blogg.torvund.net/2016/03/09/okokrims-beslag-i-domenet-popcorn-time-no/">protests
 808 from the law professor Olav Torvund</a> and
 809 <a href="http://www.klassekampen.no/article/20160311/ARTICLE/160319995">lawyer
 810 Jon Wessel-Aas</a>.  It even got some
 811 <a href="https://torrentfreak.com/norwegian-authorities-sued-over-popcorn-time-domain-seizure-160418/">coverage
 812 on TorrentFreak</a>.</p>
 813
 814 <p>I
 815 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html">
 816 wrote about the case a month ago</a>, when the
 817 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> (NUUG),
 818 where I am an active member, decided to ask the courts to test this seizure.
 819 The request was denied, but NUUG and its co-requestor EFN have not
 820 given up, and now they are rallying for support to get the seizure
 821 legally challenged.  They accept both bank and Bitcoin transfer for
 822 those that want to support the request.</p>
 823
 824 <p>If you as me believe news sites about free software should not be
 825 censored, even if the free software have both legal and illegal
 826 applications, and that DNS hijacking should be tested by the courts, I
 827 suggest you <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">show
 828 your support by donating to NUUG</a>.</a>
 829
 830       </div>
 831       <div class="tags">
 832
 833
 834         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
 835
 836
 837       </div>
 838     </div>
 839     <div class="padding"></div>
 840
 841     <div class="entry">
 842       <div class="title">
 843         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html">Debian now with ZFS on Linux included</a>
 844       </div>
 845       <div class="date">
 846         12th May 2016
 847       </div>
 848       <div class="body">
 849         <p>Today, after many years of hard work from many people,
 850 <a href="http://zfsonlinux.org/">ZFS for Linux</a> finally entered
 851 Debian.  The package status can be seen on
 852 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zfs-linux">the package tracker
 853 for zfs-linux</a>.  and
 854 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
 855 team status page</a>. If you want to help out, please join us.
 856 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">The
 857 source code</a> is available via git on Alioth.  It would also be
 858 great if you could help out with
 859 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dkms">the dkms package</a>, as
 860 it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.</p>
 861
 862       </div>
 863       <div class="tags">
 864
 865
 866         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>.
 867
 868
 869       </div>
 870     </div>
 871     <div class="padding"></div>
 872
 873     <div class="entry">
 874       <div class="title">
 875         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">What is the best multimedia player in Debian?</a>
 876       </div>
 877       <div class="date">
 878          8th May 2016
 879       </div>
 880       <div class="body">
 881         <p><strong>Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in
 882 Debian claim support for most file formats.</strong></p>
 883
 884 <p>A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser
 885 plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian
 886 Edu.  I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types
 887 for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser
 888 plugin supported most file formats / media types.
 889 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">The
 890 result</a> can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have
 891 not been updated for a while.  But browser plugins are less relevant
 892 these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone
 893 players.</p>
 894
 895 <p>A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable
 896 player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National
 897 Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why.  The cause is a
 898 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/822245">missing MIME type in the VLC
 899 desktop file</a>.  In the process I wrote a script to compare the set
 900 of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin,
 901 only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the
 902 two for VLC.  This discovery made me dig up the script I used to
 903 compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files
 904 instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian
 905 support most file formats.</p>
 906
 907 <p>The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as
 908 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">a
 909 table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included
 910 in the table</a>, with the package supporting most MIME types being
 911 listed first in the table.</p>
 912
 913 </p>The best multimedia player in Debian?  It is totem, followed by
 914 parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and
 915 kmplayer.  Time for the other players to update their announced MIME
 916 support?</p>
 917
 918       </div>
 919       <div class="tags">
 920
 921
 922         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>.
 923
 924
 925       </div>
 926     </div>
 927     <div class="padding"></div>
 928
 929     <div class="entry">
 930       <div class="title">
 931         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html">The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled</a>
 932       </div>
 933       <div class="date">
 934          4th May 2016
 935       </div>
 936       <div class="body">
 937         A friend of mine made me aware of
 938 <a href="https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/">The Pyra</a>, a
 939 handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled.  I
 940 would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)</p>
 941
 942 <p>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
 943 plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5"
 944 LCD touch screen.  The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
 945 day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
 946 confirming this.  The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
 947 last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before
 948 production started.</p>
 949
 950 <p>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
 951 Debian.  Please let me know if you know of any others.  Is it the
 952 first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?</p>
 953
 954       </div>
 955       <div class="tags">
 956
 957
 958         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>.
 959
 960
 961       </div>
 962     </div>
 963     <div class="padding"></div>
 964
 965     <div class="entry">
 966       <div class="title">
 967         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html">NUUG contests Norwegian police DNS seizure of popcorn-time.no</a>
 968       </div>
 969       <div class="date">
 970         18th April 2016
 971       </div>
 972       <div class="body">
 973         <p>It is days like today I am really happy to be a member of
 974 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User group</a>, a
 975 member association for those of us believing in free software, open
 976 standards and unix-like operating systems.  NUUG announced today it
 977 will
 978 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__NUUG_og_EFN_begj_rer_rettslig_pr_ving_for_DNS_domenebeslag_av_popcorn_time_no.shtml">try
 979 to bring the seizure of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no as
 980 unlawful</a>, to stand up for the principle that writing about a
 981 controversial topic is not infringing copyrights, and censuring web
 982 pages by hijacking DNS domain should be decided by the courts, not the
 983 police.  The DNS domain was seized by the Norwegian National Authority
 984 for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime
 985 a month ago.  I hope this bring more paying members to NUUG to give
 986 the association the financial muscle needed to bring this case as far
 987 as it must go to stop this kind of DNS hijacking.</p>
 988
 989       </div>
 990       <div class="tags">
 991
 992
 993         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
 994
 995
 996       </div>
 997     </div>
 998     <div class="padding"></div>
 999
1000     <div class="entry">
1001       <div class="title">
1002         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_F__Stone___an_inspiration_for_us_all.html">I.F. Stone - an inspiration for us all</a>
1003       </div>
1004       <div class="date">
1005         13th April 2016
1006       </div>
1007       <div class="body">
1008         <p>I first got to know I.F. Stone when I came across an article by Jon
1009 Schwarz on The Intercept
1010 <a href="https://theintercept.com/2015/05/07/new-documentary-legacy-f-stone/">about
1011 his extraordinary contribution to investigative journalism in
1012 USA</a>. The article is about a new documentary in two parts
1013 (<a href="https://vimeo.com/123974841">part one is 12 minutes</a> and
1014 <a href="https://vimeo.com/123974842">part two is 30 minutes</a>), and
1015 I found both truly fascinating.  It is amazing what he was able to
1016 find by digging up public sources and government papers.  He
1017 documented lots of government abuse and cover ups, and I find
1018 <a href="http://www.ifstone.org/weekly.php">his weekly news letters</a>
1019 inspiring to read even today.</p>
1020
1021 <p><blockquote>
1022 All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.
1023 <br>- I. F. Stone
1024 </blockquote></p>
1025
1026 <p>His starting point was that reporters should not assume governments
1027 and corporations are telling the truth, but verify all their claims as
1028 much as possible.  I wonder how many Norwegian reporters can be said
1029 to follow the principles of I. F. Stone.  They are definitely in short
1030 supply.  If you, like me half a year ago, have never heard of him,
1031 check him out.</p>
1032
1033       </div>
1034       <div class="tags">
1035
1036
1037         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
1038
1039
1040       </div>
1041     </div>
1042     <div class="padding"></div>
1043
1044     <div class="entry">
1045       <div class="title">
1046         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_French_paperback_edition_of_the_book_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig_is_now_available.html">A French paperback edition of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig is now available</a>
1047       </div>
1048       <div class="date">
1049         12th April 2016
1050       </div>
1051       <div class="body">
1052         <p>I'm happy to report that
1053 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">the
1054 French paperback edition</a> of
1055 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
1056 project to translate</a> the <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free
1057 Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig is now available for sale on
1058 Lulu.com.  Once I have formally verified my proof reading copy, which
1059 should be in the mail, the paperback edition should be available in
1060 book stores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble too.</p>
1061
1062 <p>This French edition, Culture Libre, is the work of the
1063 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> developer Benoît
1064 Guillon, who created the PO file from the initial translation
1065 available from
1066 <a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">the Wikilivres
1067 wiki pages</a> and completed and corrected the translation to match
1068 the original docbook edition my project is using, as well as
1069 coordinated the proof reading of the final result.  I believe the end
1070 result look great, but I am biased and do not read French.  In
1071 addition to the paperback edition, the book is available in PDF, EPUB
1072 and Mobi format from the github project page linked to above.</p>
1073
1074 <p>When enabling book store distribution on Lulu.com, I had to nearly
1075 triple the price to allow the book stores some profit.  I also had to
1076 accept that I will get some revenue when a book is sold via Lulu.com.
1077 But because of the non-commercial clause in the book license
1078 (CC-BY-NC), this might be a problem.  To bypass the problem I
1079 discussed how to handle the revenue with the author, and we agreed
1080 that the revenue for these editions go to the
1081 <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons non-profit
1082 Corporation</a> who handle donations to the Creative Commons project.
1083 So far they have earned around USD 70 on sales of the
1084 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>
1085 and
1086 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
1087 Bokmål</a> editions, according to Lulu.com.  They will get the revenue
1088 for the French edition too.  Their revenue is higher if you buy the
1089 book directly from Lulu.com instead of via a book store, so I
1090 recommend you buy directly from Lulu.com.</p>
1091
1092 <p>Perhaps you would like to get the book published in your language?
1093 The translation is done using a web based translator service, so the
1094 technical bar to enter is fairly low.  Get in touch if you would like
1095 to make this happen.</p>
1096
1097       </div>
1098       <div class="tags">
1099
1100
1101         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>.
1102
1103
1104       </div>
1105     </div>
1106     <div class="padding"></div>
1107
1108     <div class="entry">
1109       <div class="title">
1110         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Lets make a Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
1111       </div>
1112       <div class="date">
1113         10th April 2016
1114       </div>
1115       <div class="body">
1116         <p>During this weekends
1117 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml">bug
1118 squashing party and developer gathering</a>, we decided to do our part
1119 to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
1120 Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
1121 <a href="http://debian-handbook.info/">Debian Administrator's Handbook
1122 project</a> to get started.  If you want to help out, please start
1123 contributing using
1124 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
1125 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
1126 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
1127 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
1128 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
1129 contributors</a>.</p>
1130
1131 <p>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
1132 Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
1133 Bokmål too.  In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
1134 Mobi versions available.  And there are incomplete translations
1135 available for many more languages.</p>
1136
1137       </div>
1138       <div class="tags">
1139
1140
1141         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>.
1142
1143
1144       </div>
1145     </div>
1146     <div class="padding"></div>
1147
1148     <div class="entry">
1149       <div class="title">
1150         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_in_two_hundred_Debian_users_using_ZFS_on_Linux_.html">One in two hundred Debian users using ZFS on Linux?</a>
1151       </div>
1152       <div class="date">
1153          7th April 2016
1154       </div>
1155       <div class="body">
1156         <p>Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
1157 packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found.  I use
1158 ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
1159 But I might be wrong.</p>
1160
1161 <p>According to
1162 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=spl-linux">the popcon
1163 results for spl-linux</a>, there are 1019 Debian installations, or
1164 0.53% of the population, with the package installed.  As far as I know
1165 the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
1166 on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
1167 installation on Linux in Debian.  In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
1168 the ZFS feature is already available, and there
1169 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=zfsutils">the popcon
1170 results for zfsutils</a> show 1625 Debian installations or 0.84% of
1171 the population.  So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.</p>
1172
1173 <p>But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
1174 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00006.html">announced
1175 in April 2015</a> that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
1176 cleared, the package is still not in Debian.  The package is again in
1177 the NEW queue.  Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
1178 debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
1179 to give up.  The current status can be seen on
1180 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
1181 team status page</a>, and
1182 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">the
1183 source code</a> is available on Alioth.</p>
1184
1185 <p>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
1186 my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
1187 packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
1188 accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
1189 to help out the team.  This was the background for my blog post about
1190 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">creating,
1191 updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>, and I
1192 used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
1193 copyright file.  It is not very easy to check every one of the around
1194 2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
1195 right.  If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
1196 find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.</p>
1197
1198       </div>
1199       <div class="tags">
1200
1201
1202         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>.
1203
1204
1205       </div>
1206     </div>
1207     <div class="padding"></div>
1208
1209     <div class="entry">
1210       <div class="title">
1211         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/syslog_trusted_timestamp___chain_of_trusted_timestamps_for_your_syslog.html">syslog-trusted-timestamp - chain of trusted timestamps for your syslog</a>
1212       </div>
1213       <div class="date">
1214          2nd April 2016
1215       </div>
1216       <div class="body">
1217         <p>Two years ago, I had
1218 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">a
1219 look at trusted timestamping options available</a>, and among
1220 other things noted a still open
1221 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/742553">bug in the tsget script</a>
1222 included in openssl that made it harder than necessary to use openssl
1223 as a trusted timestamping client.  A few days ago I was told
1224 <a href="https:/www.difi.no/">the Norwegian government office DIFI</a> is
1225 close to releasing their own trusted timestamp service, and in the
1226 process I was happy to learn about a replacement for the tsget script
1227 using only curl:</p>
1228
1229 <p><pre>
1230 openssl ts -query -data "/etc/shells" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
1231   | curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/timestamp-query" \
1232          --data-binary "@-" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de > etc-shells.tsr
1233 openssl ts -reply -text -in etc-shells.tsr
1234 </pre></p>
1235
1236 <p>This produces a binary timestamp file (etc-shells.tsr) which can be
1237 used to verify that the content of the file /etc/shell with the
1238 calculated sha256 hash existed at the point in time when the request
1239 was made.  The last command extract the content of the etc-shells.tsr
1240 in human readable form.  The idea behind such timestamp is to be able
1241 to prove using cryptography that the content of a file have not
1242 changed since the file was stamped.</p>
1243
1244 <p>To verify that the file on disk match the public key signature in
1245 the timestamp file, run the following commands.  It make sure you have
1246 the required certificate for the trusted timestamp service available
1247 and use it to compare the file content with the timestamp.  In
1248 production, one should of course use a better method to verify the
1249 service certificate.</p>
1250
1251 <p><pre>
1252 wget -O ca-cert.txt https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
1253 openssl ts -verify -data /etc/shells -in etc-shells.tsr -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
1254 </pre></p>
1255
1256 <p>Wikipedia have a lot more information about
1257 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
1258 Timestamping</a> and
1259 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_timestamping">linked
1260 timestamping</a>, and there are several trusted timestamping services
1261 around, both as commercial services and as free and public services.
1262 Among the latter is
1263 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">the
1264 zeitstempel.dfn.de service</a> mentioned above and
1265 <a href="https://freetsa.org/">freetsa.org service</a> linked to from the
1266 wikipedia web site.  I believe the DIFI service should show up on
1267 https://tsa.difi.no, but it is not available to the public at the
1268 moment.  I hope this will change when it is into production.  The
1269 <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC 3161</a> trusted
1270 timestamping protocol standard is even implemented in LibreOffice,
1271 Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat, making it possible to verify when
1272 a document was created.</p>
1273
1274 <p>I would find it useful to be able to use such trusted timestamp
1275 service to make it possible to verify that my stored syslog files have
1276 not been tampered with.  This is not a new idea.  I found one example
1277 implemented on the Endian network appliances where
1278 <a href="http://help.endian.com/entries/21518508-Enabling-Timestamping-on-log-files-">the
1279 configuration of such feature was described in 2012</a>.</p>
1280
1281 <p>But I could not find any free implementation of such feature when I
1282 searched, so I decided to try to
1283 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp">build
1284 a prototype named syslog-trusted-timestamp</a>.  My idea is to
1285 generate a timestamp of the old log files after they are rotated, and
1286 store the timestamp in the new log file just after rotation.  This
1287 will form a chain that would make it possible to see if any old log
1288 files are tampered with.  But syslog is bad at handling kilobytes of
1289 binary data, so I decided to base64 encode the timestamp and add an ID
1290 and line sequence numbers to the base64 data to make it possible to
1291 reassemble the timestamp file again.  To use it, simply run it like
1292 this:
1293
1294 <p><pre>
1295 syslog-trusted-timestamp /path/to/list-of-log-files
1296 </pre></p>
1297
1298 <p>This will send a timestamp from one or more timestamp services (not
1299 yet decided nor implemented) for each listed file to the syslog using
1300 logger(1).  To verify the timestamp, the same program is used with the
1301 --verify option:</p>
1302
1303 <p><pre>
1304 syslog-trusted-timestamp --verify /path/to/log-file /path/to/log-with-timestamp
1305 </pre></p>
1306
1307 <p>The verification step is not yet well designed.  The current
1308 implementation depend on the file path being unique and unchanging,
1309 and this is not a solid assumption.  It also uses process number as
1310 timestamp ID, and this is bound to create ID collisions.  I hope to
1311 have time to come up with a better way to handle timestamp IDs and
1312 verification later.</p>
1313
1314 <p>Please check out
1315 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp">the
1316 prototype for syslog-trusted-timestamp on github</a> and send
1317 suggestions and improvement, or let me know if there already exist a
1318 similar system for timestamping logs already to allow me to join
1319 forces with others with the same interest.</p>
1320
1321 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1322 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1323 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1324
1325       </div>
1326       <div class="tags">
1327
1328
1329         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
1330
1331
1332       </div>
1333     </div>
1334     <div class="padding"></div>
1335
1336     <div class="entry">
1337       <div class="title">
1338         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Full_battery_stats_collector_is_now_available_in_Debian.html">Full battery stats collector is now available in Debian</a>
1339       </div>
1340       <div class="date">
1341         23rd March 2016
1342       </div>
1343       <div class="body">
1344         <p>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
1345 extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
1346 later processing and graphing.  The original collector store the
1347 battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
1348 collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
1349 full level, last full level and current battery level.  This make it
1350 possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
1351 the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.</p>
1352
1353 <p>The new tools are available in <tt>/usr/share/battery-stats/</tt>
1354 in the version 0.5.1 package in unstable.  Get the new battery level graph
1355 and lifetime prediction by running:
1356
1357 <p><pre>
1358 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
1359 </pre></p>
1360
1361 <p>Or select the 'Battery Level Graph' from your application menu.</p>
1362
1363 <p>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
1364 entry yet):</p>
1365
1366 <p><pre>
1367 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
1368 </pre></p>
1369
1370 <p>I'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
1371 when there are few data points.  The graphs look a bit better with a
1372 few years of data.</p>
1373
1374 <p>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
1375 collector broke in Debian.  The scripts in
1376 <tt>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/</tt> were no longer executed.  I
1377 suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
1378 know.  The issue is reported as
1379 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/818649">bug #818649</a> against
1380 pm-utils.  I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call
1381 the collector script every time the power connector is connected and
1382 disconnected.  With this fix in place it was finally time to make a
1383 new release of the package, and get it into Debian.</p>
1384
1385 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
1386 check out the
1387 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
1388 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
1389 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
1390 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
1391 As always, patches are very welcome.</p>
1392
1393       </div>
1394       <div class="tags">
1395
1396
1397         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>.
1398
1399
1400       </div>
1401     </div>
1402     <div class="padding"></div>
1403
1404     <div class="entry">
1405       <div class="title">
1406         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/UsingQR____Electronic__paper_invoices_using_JSON_and_QR_codes.html">UsingQR - "Electronic" paper invoices using JSON and QR codes</a>
1407       </div>
1408       <div class="date">
1409         19th March 2016
1410       </div>
1411       <div class="body">
1412         <p>Back in 2013 I proposed
1413 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html">a
1414 way to make paper and PDF invoices easier to process electronically by
1415 adding a QR code with the key information about the invoice</a>.  I
1416 suggested using vCard field definition, to get some standard format
1417 for name and address, but any format would work.  I did not do
1418 anything about the proposal, but hoped someone one day would make
1419 something like it.  It would make it possible to efficiently send
1420 machine readable invoices directly between seller and buyer.</p>
1421
1422 <p>This was the background when I came across a proposal and
1423 specification from the web based accounting and invoicing supplier
1424 <a href="http://www.visma.com/">Visma</a> in Sweden called
1425 <a href="http://usingqr.com/">UsingQR</a>.  Their PDF invoices contain
1426 a QR code with the key information of the invoice in JSON format.
1427 This is the typical content of a QR code following the UsingQR
1428 specification (based on a real world example, some numbers replaced to
1429 get a more bogus entry).  I've reformatted the JSON to make it easier
1430 to read.  Normally this is all on one long line:</p>
1431
1432 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-19-qr-invoice.png" align="right"><pre>
1433 {
1434  "vh":500.00,
1435  "vm":0,
1436  "vl":0,
1437  "uqr":1,
1438  "tp":1,
1439  "nme":"Din Leverandør",
1440  "cc":"NO",
1441  "cid":"997912345 MVA",
1442  "iref":"12300001",
1443  "idt":"20151022",
1444  "ddt":"20151105",
1445  "due":2500.0000,
1446  "cur":"NOK",
1447  "pt":"BBAN",
1448  "acc":"17202612345",
1449  "bc":"BIENNOK1",
1450  "adr":"0313 OSLO"
1451 }
1452 </pre></p>
1453
1454 </p>The interpretation of the fields can be found in the
1455 <a href="http://usingqr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/UsingQR_specification1.pdf">format
1456 specification</a> (revision 2 from june 2014).  The format seem to
1457 have most of the information needed to handle accounting and payment
1458 of invoices, at least the fields I have needed so far here in
1459 Norway.</p>
1460
1461 <p>Unfortunately, the site and document do not mention anything about
1462 the patent, trademark and copyright status of the format and the
1463 specification.  Because of this, I asked the people behind it back in
1464 November to clarify.  Ann-Christine Savlid (ann-christine.savlid (at)
1465 visma.com) replied that Visma had not applied for patent or trademark
1466 protection for this format, and that there were no copyright based
1467 usage limitations for the format.  I urged her to make sure this was
1468 explicitly written on the web pages and in the specification, but
1469 unfortunately this has not happened yet.  So I guess if there is
1470 submarine patents, hidden trademarks or a will to sue for copyright
1471 infringements, those starting to use the UsingQR format might be at
1472 risk, but if this happen there is some legal defense in the fact that
1473 the people behind the format claimed it was safe to do so.  At least
1474 with patents, there is always
1475 <a href="http://www.paperspecs.com/paper-news/beware-the-qr-code-patent-trap/">a
1476 chance of getting sued...</a></p>
1477
1478 <p>I also asked if they planned to maintain the format in an
1479 independent standard organization to give others more confidence that
1480 they would participate in the standardization process on equal terms
1481 with Visma, but they had no immediate plans for this.  Their plan was
1482 to work with banks to try to get more users of the format, and
1483 evaluate the way forward if the format proved to be popular.  I hope
1484 they conclude that using an open standard organisation like
1485 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> is the correct place to
1486 maintain such specification.</p>
1487
1488 <p><strong>Update 2016-03-20</strong>: Via Twitter I became aware of
1489 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319492">some comments
1490 about this blog post</a> that had several useful links and references to
1491 similar systems.  In the Czech republic, the Czech Banking Association
1492 standard #26, with short name SPAYD, uses QR codes with payment
1493 information.  More information is available from the Wikipedia page on
1494 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Payment_Descriptor">Short
1495 Payment Descriptor</a>.  And in Germany, there is a system named
1496 <a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/">BezahlCode</a>,
1497 (<a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/wp-content/uploads/BezahlCode_TechDok.pdf">specification
1498 v1.8 2013-12-05 available as PDF</a>), which uses QR codes with
1499 URL-like formatting using "bank:" as the URI schema/protocol to
1500 provide the payment information.  There is also the
1501 <a href="http://www.ferd-net.de/front_content.php?idcat=231">ZUGFeRD</a>
1502 file format that perhaps could be transfered using QR codes, but I am
1503 not sure if it is done already.  Last, in Bolivia there are reports
1504 that tax information since november 2014 need to be printed in QR
1505 format on invoices.  I have not been able to track down a
1506 specification for this format, because of my limited language skill
1507 sets.</p>
1508
1509       </div>
1510       <div class="tags">
1511
1512
1513         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>.
1514
1515
1516       </div>
1517     </div>
1518     <div class="padding"></div>
1519
1520     <div class="entry">
1521       <div class="title">
1522         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_battery_measurements_a_little_easier_in_Debian.html">Making battery measurements a little easier in Debian</a>
1523       </div>
1524       <div class="date">
1525         15th March 2016
1526       </div>
1527       <div class="body">
1528         <p>Back in September, I blogged about
1529 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">the
1530 system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery</a>, and
1531 how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced).  I
1532 created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
1533 but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
1534 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">a battery-stats
1535 package in Debian</a> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
1536 a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
1537 fixed instead.  I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
1538 hoped someone would step in and fix it.  But no-one did.</p>
1539
1540 <p>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
1541 hands.  The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
1542 battery stats (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">available from github</a>) and part of the team maintaining
1543 battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
1544 able to collect battery status using the <tt>/sys/class/power_supply/</tt>
1545 information provided by the Linux kernel.  If you install the
1546 battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
1547 graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
1548 status of the battery.  The source package build and work just fine in
1549 Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
1550 tested).  The default graph you get for that system look like this:</p>
1551
1552 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-15-battery-stats-graph-example.png" width="70%" align="center"></p>
1553
1554 <p>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
1555 battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
1556 about the battery.  The scripts are merged into the upstream
1557 battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
1558 yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way.  Will have to test a
1559 bit more before I make a new release.</p>
1560
1561 <p>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
1562 suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
1563 impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
1564 and graphing.</p>
1565
1566 <p>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
1567 battery, check out the battery-stats package in
1568 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">Debian</a> and
1569 on
1570 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
1571 I would love some help to improve the system further.</p>
1572
1573       </div>
1574       <div class="tags">
1575
1576
1577         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>.
1578
1579
1580       </div>
1581     </div>
1582     <div class="padding"></div>
1583
1584     <div class="entry">
1585       <div class="title">
1586         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">Creating, updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>
1587       </div>
1588       <div class="date">
1589         19th February 2016
1590       </div>
1591       <div class="body">
1592         <p>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
1593 details.  And one of the details is the content of the
1594 debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
1595 the code in the package in question, preferably in
1596 <a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/">machine
1597 readable DEP5 format</a>.</p>
1598
1599 <p>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
1600 and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
1601 package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters.  So getting it right
1602 the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
1603 both you and the ftpmasters some work..  Today, while trying to figure
1604 out what was wrong with
1605 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=686447">the
1606 zfsonlinux copyright file</a>, I decided to spend some time on
1607 figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
1608 semi-automatically.</p>
1609
1610 <p>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
1611 file based on the code in the source package,
1612 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake">debmake</a></tt>
1613 and <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme">cme</a></tt>.  I'm
1614 not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
1615 create a sensible draft file.  As far as I can tell, none of them can
1616 be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
1617 polished a bit before the file is OK to upload.  I found the debmake
1618 option in
1619 <a href="http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/2014/07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-5.html">a
1620 blog posts from 2014</a>.
1621
1622 <p>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
1623
1624 <p><pre>
1625 debmake -cc > debian/copyright
1626 </pre></p>
1627
1628 <p>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
1629 this might not be the best option.</p>
1630
1631 <p>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
1632 this approach in
1633 <a href="https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/">a
1634 blog post from 2015</a>.  To generate using cme, use the 'update
1635 dpkg-copyright' option:
1636
1637 <p><pre>
1638 cme update dpkg-copyright
1639 </pre></p>
1640
1641 <p>This will create or update debian/copyright.  The cme tool seem to
1642 handle UTF-8 names better than debmake.</p>
1643
1644 <p>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
1645 check if the file is correct.  For this I found two good options,
1646 <tt>debmake -k</tt> and <tt>license-reconcile</tt>.  The former seem
1647 to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
1648 ineffective blocks in the copyright file.  The latter reports missing
1649 copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
1650 names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-1.0).  I suspect it is good to use both and
1651 fix all issues reported by them before uploading.  But I do not know
1652 if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
1653 copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.</p>
1654
1655 <p>The devscripts tool <tt>licensecheck</tt> deserve mentioning.  It
1656 will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
1657 It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
1658 can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.</p>
1659
1660 <p>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
1661 debian/copyright file.  Please let me know, or blog about it on
1662 planet.debian.org.</p>
1663
1664 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1665 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1666 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1667
1668 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-20</strong>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
1669 on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
1670
1671 <p><pre>
1672 licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
1673   /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5 > debian/copyright.auto
1674 </pre></p>
1675
1676 <p>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
1677 version control system to make it easier to discover license and
1678 copyright changes in the upstream source.  I will try to do the same
1679 with my packages in the future.</p>
1680
1681 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-21</strong>: The cme author recommended
1682 against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
1683 command line.</p>
1684
1685       </div>
1686       <div class="tags">
1687
1688
1689         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>.
1690
1691
1692       </div>
1693     </div>
1694     <div class="padding"></div>
1695
1696     <div class="entry">
1697       <div class="title">
1698         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_in_Debian_to_locate_packages_with_firmware_and_mime_type_support.html">Using appstream in Debian to locate packages with firmware and mime type support</a>
1699       </div>
1700       <div class="date">
1701          4th February 2016
1702       </div>
1703       <div class="body">
1704         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">appstream system</a>
1705 is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
1706 convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
1707 firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it.  This can
1708 be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
1709 about. :)</p>
1710
1711 <p>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
1712 file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
1713 picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
1714 unstable.  In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
1715 by the kernel during kernel module loading.  To find the package
1716 providing the example file, do like this:</p>
1717
1718 <blockquote><pre>
1719 % apt install appstream
1720 [...]
1721 % apt update
1722 [...]
1723 % appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin | \
1724   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
1725 firmware-qlogic
1726 %
1727 </pre></blockquote>
1728
1729 <p>See <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">the
1730 appstream wiki</a> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
1731 a way appstream can use.</p>
1732
1733 <p>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
1734 given MIME type.  This is very useful when you get a file you do not
1735 know how to handle.  First find the mime type using <tt>file
1736 --mime-type</tt>, and next look up the package providing support for
1737 it.  Lets say you got an SVG file.  Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
1738 and you can find all packages handling this type like this:</p>
1739
1740 <blockquote><pre>
1741 % apt install appstream
1742 [...]
1743 % apt update
1744 [...]
1745 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
1746   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
1747 bkchem
1748 phototonic
1749 inkscape
1750 shutter
1751 tetzle
1752 geeqie
1753 xia
1754 pinta
1755 gthumb
1756 karbon
1757 comix
1758 mirage
1759 viewnior
1760 postr
1761 ristretto
1762 kolourpaint4
1763 eog
1764 eom
1765 gimagereader
1766 midori
1767 %
1768 </pre></blockquote>
1769
1770 <p>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
1771 packages providing appstream metadata.</p>
1772
1773       </div>
1774       <div class="tags">
1775
1776
1777         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>.
1778
1779
1780       </div>
1781     </div>
1782     <div class="padding"></div>
1783
1784     <div class="entry">
1785       <div class="title">
1786         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html">Creepy, visualise geotagged social media information - nice free software</a>
1787       </div>
1788       <div class="date">
1789         24th January 2016
1790       </div>
1791       <div class="body">
1792         <p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
1793 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
1794 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
1795 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent).  And if their
1796 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
1797 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
1798 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
1799 during installation).  And when these programs send out information to
1800 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
1801 extra care is taken to not send the location.  The provided
1802 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
1803 good and bad, depend on your point of view).  What is certain, is that
1804 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
1805 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
1806 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
1807 entities.</p>
1808
1809 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
1810
1811 <p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
1812 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing.  It is
1813 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
1814 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
1815 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information.  But the
1816 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
1817 tool to do so is called
1818 <a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>.  I
1819 discovered it when I read
1820 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
1821 article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
1822 November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
1823 The python program was in Debian, but
1824 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
1825 Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained.  I
1826 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
1827 have time to fix it then.  This Christmas I decided to finally try to
1828 get Creepy operational in Debian.  Now a fixed version is available in
1829 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
1830 are now included
1831 <a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
1832
1833 <p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
1834 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
1835 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
1836 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
1837 these services.  Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
1838 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
1839 days it is impossible.  This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
1840 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
1841 information to them about your search interests.  This should be taken
1842 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
1843 about yourself with the services.</p>
1844
1845 <p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
1846 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
1847 of Norway.  One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
1848 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
1849 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
1850 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
1851 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
1852 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
1853 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
1854 things.  A similar technique have been
1855 <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
1856 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
1857 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
1858 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
1859 public.</p>
1860
1861 <p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
1862 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
1863 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
1864 python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
1865
1866 <p>(I have uploaded
1867 <a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
1868 screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
1869 Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
1870
1871       </div>
1872       <div class="tags">
1873
1874
1875         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
1876
1877
1878       </div>
1879     </div>
1880     <div class="padding"></div>
1881
1882     <div class="entry">
1883       <div class="title">
1884         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Always_download_Debian_packages_using_Tor___the_simple_recipe.html">Always download Debian packages using Tor - the simple recipe</a>
1885       </div>
1886       <div class="date">
1887         15th January 2016
1888       </div>
1889       <div class="body">
1890         <p>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
1891 <a href="https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/331/what-is-to-be-done/">observed
1892 that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
1893 believe a computer have a given security hole</a> if it download a
1894 security fix from a Debian mirror.  This is a good reason to always
1895 use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
1896 listening do not know which IP address to attack.  In August, Richard
1897 Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
1898 to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
1899 download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
1900 <a href="http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/08/24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/">proposed
1901 to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror</a>.  He
1902 was not the first to propose this, as the
1903 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor">apt-transport-tor</a></tt>
1904 package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
1905 to use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, but I was not
1906 aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.</p>
1907
1908 <p>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
1909 sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
1910 Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
1911 it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
1912 making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.</p>
1913
1914 <p>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
1915 installing <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> and replacing http and https
1916 urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
1917 of the official Debian mirror site.  I recommend installing
1918 <tt>etckeeper</tt> before you start to have a history of the changes
1919 done in /etc/.</p>
1920
1921 <blockquote><pre>
1922 apt install apt-transport-tor
1923 sed -i 's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%' /etc/apt/sources.list
1924 sed -i 's% http% tor+http%' /etc/apt/sources.list
1925 </pre></blockquote>
1926
1927 <p>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
1928 the sed commands for these too.  The sed command is assuming your are
1929 using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror.  Adjust the command (or just
1930 edit the file manually) to match your mirror.</p>
1931
1932 <p>This work in Debian Jessie and later.  Note that tools like
1933 <tt>apt-file</tt> only recently started using the apt transport
1934 system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs.  For
1935 <tt>apt-file</tt> you need the version currently in experimental,
1936 which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable.  So if you
1937 need a working <tt>apt-file</tt>, this is not for you.</p>
1938
1939 <p>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
1940 using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
1941 update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
1942 masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine.  Using Tor will
1943 become normal for the machine in question.</p>
1944
1945 <p>On <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox</a>, APT
1946 is set up by default to use <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> when Tor is
1947 enabled.  It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
1948 system.</p>
1949
1950       </div>
1951       <div class="tags">
1952
1953
1954         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>.
1955
1956
1957       </div>
1958     </div>
1959     <div class="padding"></div>
1960
1961     <div class="entry">
1962       <div class="title">
1963         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenALPR__find_car_license_plates_in_video_streams___nice_free_software.html">OpenALPR, find car license plates in video streams - nice free software</a>
1964       </div>
1965       <div class="date">
1966         23rd December 2015
1967       </div>
1968       <div class="body">
1969         <p>When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to
1970 call the car license plate numbers in those days.  I would write the
1971 numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
1972 to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
1973 exotic or special region codes and numbers.  It was a fun game to pass
1974 time, as we kids have plenty of it.</p>
1975
1976 <p>A few days I came across
1977 <a href="https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr">the OpenALPR
1978 project</a>, a free software project to automatically discover and
1979 report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
1980 "car numbers" in a machine readable format.  I've been looking for
1981 such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
1982 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition">automatic
1983 number plate recognition</a> tool only is available in the hands of
1984 the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
1985 even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance.  I
1986 discovered the developer
1987 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/747509">wanted to get the tool into
1988 Debian</a>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
1989 help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
1990 archive.</p>
1991
1992 <p>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
1993 it into Debian, where it currently
1994 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2.1-1.html">waits
1995 in the NEW queue</a> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.</p>
1996
1997 <p>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
1998 for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
1999 surveillance system?  Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
2000 and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
2001 when number plates on my watch list are discovered.  Another use case
2002 was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
2003 to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
2004 car.  When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
2005 capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
2006 open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway.  I
2007 guess for such use case it make sense.  I am sure there are other use
2008 cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.</p>
2009
2010 <p>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
2011 out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
2012 before running "debuild" to build the source.  Or wait a bit until the
2013 package show up in unstable.</p>
2014
2015       </div>
2016       <div class="tags">
2017
2018
2019         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
2020
2021
2022       </div>
2023     </div>
2024     <div class="padding"></div>
2025
2026     <div class="entry">
2027       <div class="title">
2028         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">Using appstream with isenkram to install hardware related packages in Debian</a>
2029       </div>
2030       <div class="date">
2031         20th December 2015
2032       </div>
2033       <div class="body">
2034         <p>Around three years ago, I created
2035 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the isenkram
2036 system</a> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
2037 hardware related packages.  A GUI system in the isenkram package will
2038 present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
2039 relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine.  The same
2040 lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
2041 tools in the isenkram-cli package.  In addition to mapping hardware,
2042 it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
2043 install needed firmware packages automatically.  The key for this
2044 system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
2045 words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
2046 with.</p>
2047
2048 <p>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
2049 adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
2050 time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
2051 I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
2052 the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
2053 was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
2054 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
2055 appstream system</a> was announced.  I got in touch and suggested to
2056 add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
2057 appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
2058 Debian version of appstream.</p>
2059
2060 <p>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
2061 and today I uploaded a new version 0.20 of isenkram adding support for
2062 appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages.  The only
2063 package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
2064 pymissile package.  I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
2065 how do add the required
2066 <a href="https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html">metadata
2067 in pymissile</a>.  I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
2068 this content:</p>
2069
2070 <blockquote><pre>
2071 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
2072 &lt;component&gt;
2073   &lt;id&gt;pymissile&lt;/id&gt;
2074   &lt;metadata_license&gt;MIT&lt;/metadata_license&gt;
2075   &lt;name&gt;pymissile&lt;/name&gt;
2076   &lt;summary&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher&lt;/summary&gt;
2077   &lt;description&gt;
2078     &lt;p&gt;
2079       Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
2080       Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
2081       motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
2082       launcher.
2083     &lt;/p&gt;
2084   &lt;/description&gt;
2085   &lt;provides&gt;
2086     &lt;modalias&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*&lt;/modalias&gt;
2087   &lt;/provides&gt;
2088 &lt;/component&gt;
2089 </pre></blockquote>
2090
2091 <p>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
2092 which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
2093 (modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel.  In this case, it
2094 will map to all USB devices with vendor code 1130 and product code
2095 0202.</p>
2096
2097 <p>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
2098 are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
2099 appstream files.  Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
2100 these files.  A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
2101 it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
2102 (in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use).  But
2103 it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
2104 upstream for this project is dormant.</p>
2105
2106 <p>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
2107 mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
2108 appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
2109 package under /usr/share/appdata/.  I did this by adding the following
2110 line to debian/pymissile.install:</p>
2111
2112 <blockquote><pre>
2113 debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
2114 </pre></blockquote>
2115
2116 <p>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
2117 all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
2118 pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
2119 installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
2120 question.</p>
2121
2122 <p>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
2123 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a> proposal.</p>
2124
2125 <p>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
2126 try running this command on the command line:</p>
2127
2128 <blockquote><pre>
2129 cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
2130 </pre></blockquote>
2131
2132 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
2133 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
2134 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
2135
2136       </div>
2137       <div class="tags">
2138
2139
2140         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>.
2141
2142
2143       </div>
2144     </div>
2145     <div class="padding"></div>
2146
2147     <div class="entry">
2148       <div class="title">
2149         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_GNU_General_Public_License_is_not_magic_pixie_dust.html">The GNU General Public License is not magic pixie dust</a>
2150       </div>
2151       <div class="date">
2152         30th November 2015
2153       </div>
2154       <div class="body">
2155         <p>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
2156 "<a href="http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2015/11/27/sfc-supporter/">The
2157 GPL is not magic pixie dust</a>" explain the importance of making sure
2158 the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GPL</a> is enforced.
2159 I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:<p>
2160
2161 <blockquote>
2162
2163 <p><a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/"><img src="https://sfconservancy.org/img/supporter-badge.png" width="194" height="90" alt="Become a Software Freedom Conservancy Supporter!" align="right" border="0" /></a></p>
2164
2165 <blockquote>
2166 The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.<br/>
2167
2168 The first step is to choose a
2169 <a href="https://copyleft.org/">copyleft</a> license for your
2170 code.<br/>
2171
2172 The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
2173 <b>it must be enforced</b><br/>
2174
2175 and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
2176 work<br/>
2177
2178 is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
2179 </blockquote>
2180
2181 <p><small>-- <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/">Bradley Kuhn</a>, in
2182 <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in Freedom">FaiF</a>
2183 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode
2184 0x57</a></small></p>
2185
2186 <p>As the Debian Website
2187 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/794116">used</a>
2188 <a href="https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=1.24&amp;r2=1.25">to</a>
2189 imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
2190 the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
2191 software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
2192 software products.  Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
2193 to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
2194 such licenses are not enough.  With the ongoing adoption of Free
2195 Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's
2196 expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
2197 ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always.  As Karen
2198 and Bradley explained in <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in
2199 Freedom">FaiF</a>
2200 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode 0x57</a>,
2201 copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
2202 to protect it.  The reality of today's world is that legal
2203 representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming.  With
2204 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/">gpl-violations.org</a> in hiatus
2205 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/news/20151027-homepage-recovers/">until</a>
2206 some time in 2016, the <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/">Software
2207 Freedom Conservancy</a> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
2208 of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
2209 In March the SFC supported a
2210 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">lawsuit
2211 by Christoph Hellwig</a> against VMware for refusing to
2212 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html">comply
2213 with the GPL</a> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
2214 kernel.  Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
2215 conferences
2216 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">blocked
2217 or cancelled their talks</a>.  As a result they have decided to rely
2218 less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
2219 individuals who support Free Software and copyleft.  So the SFC has
2220 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/23/2015fundraiser/">launched</a>
2221 a <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">campaign</a> to create
2222 a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
2223 supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
2224 Software.</p>
2225
2226 <p>If you support Free Software,
2227 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/26/like-what-I-do/">like</a>
2228 what the SFC do, agree with their
2229 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html">compliance
2230 principles</a>, are happy about their
2231 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">successes</a> in 2015,
2232 work on a project that is an SFC
2233 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/">member</a> and or
2234 just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
2235 <a href="https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA">Christopher
2236 Allan Webber</a>,
2237 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">Carol
2238 Smith</a>,
2239 <a href="http://www.jonobacon.org/2015/11/25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/">Jono
2240 Bacon</a>, myself and
2241 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters">others</a> in
2242 becoming a
2243 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">supporter</a>.  For the
2244 next week your donation will be
2245 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/27/black-friday/">matched</a>
2246 by an anonymous donor.  Please also consider asking your employer to
2247 match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC.  Don't forget to
2248 spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
2249 social media accounts.</p>
2250
2251 </blockquote>
2252
2253 <p>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
2254 of Software Freedom Conservancy myself.  Perhaps you should be a
2255 supporter too?</p>
2256
2257       </div>
2258       <div class="tags">
2259
2260
2261         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
2262
2263
2264       </div>
2265     </div>
2266     <div class="padding"></div>
2267
2268     <div class="entry">
2269       <div class="title">
2270         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html">PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9</a>
2271       </div>
2272       <div class="date">
2273         17th November 2015
2274       </div>
2275       <div class="body">
2276         <p>I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
2277 set it up properly.  I wanted to generate it offline and have it
2278 available on <a href="http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp">a OpenPGP
2279 smart card</a> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
2280 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever.  But
2281 finally I've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
2282 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key.  See
2283 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-11-17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt">the
2284 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key</a> for
2285 the details.  This is my new key:</p>
2286
2287 <pre>
2288 pub   3936R/<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/111D6B29EE4E02F9.html">111D6B29EE4E02F9</a> 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-14]
2289       Key fingerprint = 3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87 78F1  D827 111D 6B29 EE4E 02F9
2290 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@hungry.com&gt;
2291 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@debian.org&gt;
2292 sub   4096R/87BAFB0E 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
2293 sub   4096R/F91E6DE9 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
2294 sub   4096R/A0439BAB 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
2295 </pre>
2296
2297 <p>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
2298 my old key.</p>
2299
2300 <p>If you signed my old key
2301 (<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html">DB4CCC4B2A30D729</a>),
2302 I'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
2303 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
2304 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.</p>
2305
2306       </div>
2307       <div class="tags">
2308
2309
2310         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>.
2311
2312
2313       </div>
2314     </div>
2315     <div class="padding"></div>
2316
2317     <div class="entry">
2318       <div class="title">
2319         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Pentagon_deciding_the_Norwegian_negotiating_position_on_Internet_governance_.html">Is Pentagon deciding the Norwegian negotiating position on Internet governance?</a>
2320       </div>
2321       <div class="date">
2322          3rd November 2015
2323       </div>
2324       <div class="body">
2325         <p>In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a
2326 list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices.
2327 Internal notes should also be documented.  The document list (called a mail
2328 journal - "postjournal" in Norwegian) is public information and thanks
2329 to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail
2330 journal is available for everyone.  Most offices even publish the mail
2331 journal on their web pages, as PDFs or tables in web pages.  The state-level offices even have a shared web based search service (called
2332 <a href="https://www.oep.no/">Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal -
2333 OEP</a>) to make it possible to search the entries in the list.  Not
2334 all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to
2335 use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting
2336 journal entries .</p>
2337
2338 <p>In 2012 I came across a document in the mail journal for the
2339 Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications on OEP that
2340 piqued my interest.  The title of the document was
2341 "<a href="https://www.oep.no/search/resultSingle.html?journalPostId=4192362">Internet
2342 Governance and how it affects national security</a>" (Norwegian:
2343 "Internet Governance og påvirkning på nasjonal sikkerhet").  The
2344 document date was 2012-05-22, and it was said to be sent from the
2345 "Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations".  I asked for a
2346 copy, but my request was rejected with a reference to a legal clause said to authorize them to reject it
2347 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20,
2348 letter c</a>) and an explanation that the document was exempt because
2349 of foreign policy interests as it contained information related to the
2350 Norwegian negotiating position, negotiating strategies or similar.  I
2351 was told the information in the document related to the ongoing
2352 negotiation in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).  The
2353 explanation made sense to me in early January 2013, as a ITU
2354 conference in Dubay discussing Internet Governance
2355 (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication_Union#World_Conference_on_International_Telecommunications_2012_.28WCIT-12.29">World
2356 Conference on International Telecommunications - WCIT-12</a>) had just
2357 ended,
2358 <a href="http://www.digi.no/kommentarer/2012/12/18/tvil-om-usas-rolle-pa-teletoppmote">reportedly
2359 in chaos</a> when USA walked out of the negotiations and 25 countries
2360 including Norway refused to sign the new treaty.  It seemed
2361 reasonable to believe talks were still going on a few weeks later.
2362 Norway was represented at the ITU meeting by two authorities, the
2363 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/">Norwegian Communications Authority</a>
2364 and the <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dep/sd/">Ministry of
2365 Transport and Communications</a>.  This might be the reason the letter
2366 was sent to the ministry.  As I was unable to find the document in the
2367 mail journal of any Norwegian UN mission, I asked the ministry who had
2368 sent the document to the ministry, and was told that it was the Deputy
2369 Permanent Representative with the Permanent Mission of Norway in
2370 Geneva.</p>
2371
2372 <p>Three years later, I was still curious about the content of that
2373 document, and again asked for a copy, believing the negotiation was
2374 over now.  This time
2375 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/kopi_av_dokumenter_i_sak_2012914">I
2376 asked both the Ministry of Transport and Communications as the
2377 receiver</a> and
2378 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/brev_om_internet_governance_og_p">asked
2379 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva as the sender</a> for a
2380 copy, to see if they both agreed that it should be withheld from the
2381 public.  The ministry upheld its rejection quoting the same law
2382 reference as before, while the permanent mission rejected it quoting a
2383 different clause
2384 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20
2385 letter b</a>), claiming that they were required to keep the
2386 content of the document from the public because it contained
2387 information given to Norway with the expressed or implied expectation
2388 that the information should not be made public.  I asked the permanent
2389 mission for an explanation, and was told that the document contained
2390 an account from a meeting held in the Pentagon for a limited group of NATO
2391 nations where the organiser of the meeting did not intend the content
2392 of the meeting to be publicly known.  They explained that giving me a
2393 copy might cause Norway to not get access to similar information in
2394 the future and thus hurt the future foreign interests of Norway.  They
2395 also explained that the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was not
2396 the author of the document, they only got a copy of it, and because of
2397 this had not listed it in their mail journal.</p>
2398
2399 <p>Armed with this
2400 knowledge I asked the Ministry to reconsider and asked who was the
2401 author of the document, now realising that it was not same as the
2402 "sender" according to Ministry of Transport and Communications.  The
2403 ministry upheld its rejection but told me the name of the author of
2404 the document.  According to
2405 <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/unga69_rapport1/id2001204/">a
2406 government report</a> the author was with the Permanent Mission of
2407 Norway in New York a bit more than a year later (2014-09-22), so I
2408 guessed that might be the office responsible for writing and sending
2409 the report initially and
2410 <a href="https://www.mimesbronn.no/request/mote_2012_i_pentagon_om_itu">asked
2411 them for a copy</a> but I was obviously wrong as I was told that the
2412 document was unknown to them and that the author did not work there
2413 when the document was written.  Next, I asked the Permanent Mission of
2414 Norway in Geneva and the Foreign Ministry to reconsider and at least
2415 tell me who sent the document to Deputy Permanent Representative with
2416 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva.  The Foreign Ministry also
2417 upheld its rejection, but told me that the person sending the document
2418 to Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was the defence attaché with
2419 the Norwegian Embassy in Washington.  I do not know if this is the
2420 same person as the author of the document.</p>
2421
2422 <p>If I understand the situation correctly, someone capable of
2423 inviting selected NATO nations to a meeting in Pentagon organised a
2424 meeting where someone representing the Norwegian defence attaché in
2425 Washington attended, and the account from this meeting is interpreted
2426 by the Ministry of Transport and Communications to expose Norways
2427 negotiating position, negotiating strategies and similar regarding the
2428 ITU negotiations on Internet Governance.  It is truly amazing what can
2429 be derived from mere meta-data.</p>
2430
2431 <p>I wonder which NATO countries besides Norway attended this meeting?
2432 And what exactly was said and done at the meeting?  Anyone know?</p>
2433
2434       </div>
2435       <div class="tags">
2436
2437
2438         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
2439
2440
2441       </div>
2442     </div>
2443     <div class="padding"></div>
2444
2445     <div class="entry">
2446       <div class="title">
2447         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_book___Fri_kultur__by__lessig__a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of__Free_Culture__from_2004.html">New book, "Fri kultur" by @lessig, a Norwegian Bokmål translation of "Free Culture" from 2004</a>
2448       </div>
2449       <div class="date">
2450         31st October 2015
2451       </div>
2452       <div class="body">
2453         <p>People keep asking me where to get the various forms of the book I
2454 published last week, the Norwegian Bokmål edition of Lawrence Lessigs
2455 book <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>.  It was
2456 published on paper via lulu.com, and is also available in PDF, ePub
2457 and MOBI format.  I currently sell the paper edition for self cost
2458 from lulu.com, but might extend the distribution to book stores like
2459 Amazon and Barnes & Noble later.  This will double the price and force
2460 me to make a profit from selling the book.  Anyway, here are links to
2461 get the book in different formats:</p>
2462
2463 <ul>
2464
2465   <li><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22406445.html">Buy
2466     paper edition from lulu.com</a></li>
2467
2468   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf">Download
2469     PDF, size 7.9 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
2470
2471   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub">Download
2472     ePub, size 11 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
2473
2474   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.mobi">Download
2475     MOBI, size 3.8 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
2476
2477 </ul>
2478
2479 <p>Note that the MOBI version have problems with the table of content,
2480 at least with the viewers I have been able to test.  And the ePub file
2481 have several problems according to
2482 <a href="https://github.com/IDPF/epubcheck">epubcheck</a>, but seem
2483 to display fine in the viewers I have tested.  All the files needed to
2484 create the book in various forms are available from
2485 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">the
2486 github project page</a>.</p>
2487
2488 <p>The project got press coverage from the Norwegian IT news site
2489 digi.no.  Check out the article
2490 "<a href="http://www.digi.no/juss_og_samfunn/2015/10/29/vil-apne-politikernes-oyne-for-creative-commons">Vil
2491 åpne politikernes øyne for Creative Commons</a>".</li>
2492
2493 <p>I've <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">blogged
2494 about the project</a> as it moved along.  The blogs document the translation
2495 progress and insights I had along the way.</p>
2496
2497       </div>
2498       <div class="tags">
2499
2500
2501         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>.
2502
2503
2504       </div>
2505     </div>
2506     <div class="padding"></div>
2507
2508     <div class="entry">
2509       <div class="title">
2510         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Free_Culture__by__lessig___The_background_story_for_Creative_Commons___new_edition_available.html">"Free Culture" by @lessig - The background story for Creative Commons - new edition available</a>
2511       </div>
2512       <div class="date">
2513         23rd October 2015
2514       </div>
2515       <div class="body">
2516         <p><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">Click
2517 here to buy the book</a>.</p>
2518
2519 <p>In 2004, as the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons
2520 movement</a> gained momentum, its creator Lawrence Lessig wrote the
2521 book <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)">Free
2522 Culture</a> to explain the problems with increasing copyright
2523 regulation and suggest some solutions.  I read the book back then and
2524 was very moved by it.  Reading the book inspired me and changed the
2525 way I looked on copyright law, and I would love it if more people
2526 would read it too.</p>
2527
2528 <p>Because of this, I decided in the summer of 2012 to translate it to
2529 Norwegian Bokmål and publish it for those of my friends and family
2530 that prefer to read books in Norwegian.  I translated the book using
2531 docbook and a gettext PO file, and a byproduct of this process is a
2532 new edition of the English original.  I've been in touch with the
2533 author during by work, and he said it was fine with him if I also
2534 published an English version.  So I decided to do so.  Today, I made
2535 this edition
2536 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">available
2537 for sale on Lulu.com</a>, for those interested in a paper book.  This
2538 is the cover:
2539
2540 <p align="center"><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-10-23-free-culture-english-published-cover.png"/></a></p>
2541
2542 <p>The Norwegian Bokmål version will be available for purchase in a
2543 few days.  I also plan to publish a French version in a few weeks or
2544 months, depending on the amount of people with knowledge of French to
2545 join the translation project.  So far there is only one active
2546 person, but the French book is almost completely translated but
2547 need some proof reading.</p>
2548
2549 <p>The book is also available in PDF, ePub and MOBI formats from
2550 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
2551 github project page</a>.  Note the ePub and MOBI versions have some
2552 formatting problems I believe is due to bugs in the docbook tool
2553 dbtoepub (Debian BTS issues
2554 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=795842">#795842</a>
2555 and
2556 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=796871">#796871</a>),
2557 but I have not taken the time to investigate.  I recommend the PDF and
2558 ePub version for now, as they seem to show up fine in the viewers I
2559 have available.</p>
2560
2561 <p>After the translation to Norwegian Bokmål was complete, I was able
2562 to secure some sponsoring from
2563 <a href="http://www.nuugfoundation.no/">the NUUG Foundation</a> to
2564 print the book.  This is the reason their logo is located on the back
2565 cover. I am very grateful for their contribution, and will use it to
2566 give a copy of the Norwegian edition to members of the Norwegian
2567 Parliament and other decision makers here in Norway.</p>
2568
2569       </div>
2570       <div class="tags">
2571
2572
2573         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>.
2574
2575
2576       </div>
2577     </div>
2578     <div class="padding"></div>
2579
2580     <div class="entry">
2581       <div class="title">
2582         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lawrence_Lessig_interviewed_Edward_Snowden_a_year_ago.html">Lawrence Lessig interviewed Edward Snowden a year ago</a>
2583       </div>
2584       <div class="date">
2585         19th October 2015
2586       </div>
2587       <div class="body">
2588         <p>Last year, <a href="https://lessig2016.us/">US president candidate
2589 in the Democratic Party</a> Lawrence interviewed Edward Snowden.  The
2590 one hour interview was
2591 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Sr96TFQQE">published by
2592 Harvard Law School 2014-10-23 on Youtube</a>, and the meeting took
2593 place 2014-10-20.</p>
2594
2595 <p>The questions are very good, and there is lots of useful
2596 information to be learned and very interesting issues to think about
2597 being raised.  Please check it out.</p>
2598
2599 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/o_Sr96TFQQE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
2600
2601 <p>I find it especially interesting to hear again that Snowden did try
2602 to bring up his reservations through the official channels without any
2603 luck.  It is in sharp contrast to the answers made 2013-11-06 by the
2604 Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg to the Norwegian Parliament,
2605 <a href="https://tale.holderdeord.no/speeches/s131106/68">claiming
2606 Snowden is no Whistle-Blower</a> because he should have taken up his
2607 concerns internally and using official channels.  It make me sad
2608 that this is the political leadership we have here in Norway.</p>
2609
2610       </div>
2611       <div class="tags">
2612
2613
2614         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>.
2615
2616
2617       </div>
2618     </div>
2619     <div class="padding"></div>
2620
2621     <div class="entry">
2622       <div class="title">
2623         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Story_of_Aaron_Swartz___Let_us_all_weep_.html">The Story of Aaron Swartz - Let us all weep!</a>
2624       </div>
2625       <div class="date">
2626          8th October 2015
2627       </div>
2628       <div class="body">
2629         <p>The movie "<a href="http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy">The
2630 Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz</a>" is both inspiring
2631 and depressing at the same time.  The work of Aaron Swartz has
2632 inspired me in my work, and I am grateful of all the improvements he
2633 was able to initiate or complete.  I wish I am able to do as much good
2634 in my life as he did in his.  Every minute of this 1:45 long movie is
2635 inspiring in documenting how much impact a single person can have on
2636 improving the society and this world.  And it is depressing in
2637 documenting how the law enforcement of USA (and other countries) is
2638 corrupted to a point where they can push a bright kid to his death for
2639 downloading too many scientific articles.  Aaron is dead.  Let us all
2640 weep.</p>
2641
2642 <p>The movie is also available on
2643 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXr-2hwTk58">Youtube</a>.  I
2644 wish there were Norwegian subtitles available, so I could show it to
2645 my parents.</p>
2646
2647       </div>
2648       <div class="tags">
2649
2650
2651         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>.
2652
2653
2654       </div>
2655     </div>
2656     <div class="padding"></div>
2657
2658     <div class="entry">
2659       <div class="title">
2660         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_Docbook_PDF_EPUB_MOBI_edition_of_the_Free_Culture_book.html">French Docbook/PDF/EPUB/MOBI edition of the Free Culture book</a>
2661       </div>
2662       <div class="date">
2663          1st October 2015
2664       </div>
2665       <div class="body">
2666         <p>As I wrap up the Norwegian version of
2667 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
2668 Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig (still waiting for my final proof
2669 reading copy to arrive in the mail), my great
2670 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> helper and
2671 developer of the dblatex docbook processor, Benoît Guillon, decided a
2672 to try to create a French version of the book.  He started with the
2673 French translation available from the
2674 <a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">Wikilivres wiki
2675 pages</a>, and wrote a program to convert it into a PO file, allowing
2676 the translation to be integrated into the po4a based framework I use
2677 to create the Norwegian translation from the English edition.  We meet
2678 on the <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23dblatex">#dblatex IRC
2679 channel</a> to discuss the work.  If you want to help create a French
2680 edition, check out
2681 <a href="https://github.com/marsgui/free-culture-lessig">his git
2682 repository</a> and join us on IRC.  If the French edition look good,
2683 we might publish it as a paper book on lulu.com.  A French version of
2684 the drawings and the cover need to be provided for this to happen.</p>
2685
2686       </div>
2687       <div class="tags">
2688
2689
2690         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>.
2691
2692
2693       </div>
2694     </div>
2695     <div class="padding"></div>
2696
2697     <div class="entry">
2698       <div class="title">
2699         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">The life and death of a laptop battery</a>
2700       </div>
2701       <div class="date">
2702         24th September 2015
2703       </div>
2704       <div class="body">
2705         <p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
2706 But this do not last.  The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
2707 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
2708 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
2709 all the time.  Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
2710 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
2711 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
2712
2713 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
2714
2715 <p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
2716 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
2717 by someone else.  I found
2718 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
2719 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
2720 broken.  I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
2721 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
2722 from him.  Via
2723 <a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
2724 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
2725 discovered
2726 <a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
2727 available in Debian.</p>
2728
2729 <p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
2730 battery stats ever since. Now my
2731 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
2732 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
2733 when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity.  My
2734 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
2735
2736 <pre>
2737 #!/bin/sh
2738 # Inspired by
2739 # http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
2740 # See also
2741 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
2742 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
2743
2744 files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
2745     energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
2746
2747 if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
2748     (
2749         printf "timestamp,"
2750         for f in $files; do
2751             printf "%s," $f
2752         done
2753         echo
2754     ) > "$logfile"
2755 fi
2756
2757 log_battery() {
2758     # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
2759     # when several log processes run in parallel.
2760     msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
2761         for f in $files; do \
2762             printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
2763         done)
2764     echo "$msg"
2765 }
2766
2767 cd /sys/class/power_supply
2768
2769 for bat in BAT*; do
2770     (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
2771 done
2772 </pre>
2773
2774 <p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
2775 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
2776 and out of hibernation and suspend.  In addition, it collect a value
2777 every 10 minutes.  This make it possible for me know when the battery
2778 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
2779 The code for the Debian package
2780 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
2781 available on github</a>.</p>
2782
2783 <p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
2784
2785 <pre>
2786 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
2787 1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
2788 [...]
2789 1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
2790 1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
2791 </pre>
2792
2793 <p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
2794 over time.  This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
2795 battery.</p>
2796
2797 <p>But why is this happening?  Why are my laptop batteries always
2798 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
2799 satellites keep working year after year.  If we are to believe
2800 <a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
2801 University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
2802 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
2803 all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
2804 I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
2805 <a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
2806 the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
2807 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
2808 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
2809 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
2810 Linux too.</p>
2811
2812 <p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
2813 stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
2814 preparation for a longer trip?  I found
2815 <a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
2816 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
2817 80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
2818 load).</p>
2819
2820 <p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
2821 at the start.  I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
2822 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
2823 back to design capacity.  And I wonder if the discharge and charge
2824 speed change over time, or if this stay the same.  I did not yet try
2825 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
2826 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
2827 those.</p>
2828
2829 <p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
2830 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
2831 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
2832 initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
2833 and stop.  I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
2834 and need to be replaced.  The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
2835 specific.</p>
2836
2837       </div>
2838       <div class="tags">
2839
2840
2841         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>.
2842
2843
2844       </div>
2845     </div>
2846     <div class="padding"></div>
2847
2848     <div class="entry">
2849       <div class="title">
2850         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Book_cover_for_the_Free_Culture_book_finally_done.html">Book cover for the Free Culture book finally done</a>
2851       </div>
2852       <div class="date">
2853          3rd September 2015
2854       </div>
2855       <div class="body">
2856         <p>Creating a good looking book cover proved harder than I expected.
2857 I wanted to create a cover looking similar to the original cover of
2858 the
2859 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
2860 Culture</a> book we are translating to Norwegian, and I wanted it in
2861 vector format for high resolution printing.  But my inkscape knowledge
2862 were not nearly good enough to pull that off.
2863
2864 <p>But thanks to the great inkscape community, I was able to wrap up
2865 the cover yesterday evening.  I asked on the
2866 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23inkscape">#inkscape IRC channel</a>
2867 on Freenode for help and clues, and Marc Jeanmougin (Mc-) volunteered
2868 to try to recreate it based on the PDF of the cover from the HTML
2869 version.  Not only did he create a
2870 <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/copy1.svg ">SVG document with
2871 the original and his vector version side by side</a>, he even provided
2872 an <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/out-1.ogv">instruction
2873 video</a> explaining how he did it</a>.  But the instruction video is
2874 not easy to follow for an untrained inkscape user. The video is a
2875 recording on how he did it, and he is obviously very experienced as
2876 the menu selections are very quick and he mentioned on IRC that he did
2877 use some keyboard shortcuts that can't be seen on the video, but it
2878 give a good idea about the inkscape operations to use to create the
2879 stripes with the embossed copyright sign in the center.</p>
2880
2881 <p>I took his SVG file, copied the vector image and re-sized it to fit
2882 on the cover I was drawing.  I am happy with the end result, and the
2883 current english version look like this:</p>
2884
2885 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-03-free-culture-cover.png" width="70%" align="center"/>
2886
2887 <p>I am not quite sure about the text on the back, but guess it will
2888 do.  I picked three quotes from the official site for the book, and
2889 hope it will work to trigger the interest of potential readers.  The
2890 Norwegian cover will look the same, but with the texts and bar code
2891 replaced with the Norwegian version.</p>
2892
2893 <p>The book is very close to being ready for publication, and I expect
2894 to upload the final draft to Lulu in the next few days and order a
2895 final proof reading copy to verify that everything look like it should
2896 before allowing everyone to order their own copy of Free Culture, in
2897 English or Norwegian Bokmål.  I'm waiting to give the the productive
2898 proof readers a chance to complete their work.</p>
2899
2900       </div>
2901       <div class="tags">
2902
2903
2904         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>.
2905
2906
2907       </div>
2908     </div>
2909     <div class="padding"></div>
2910
2911     <div class="entry">
2912       <div class="title">
2913         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/In_my_hand__a_pocket_book_edition_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_.html">In my hand, a pocket book edition of the Norwegian Free Culture book!</a>
2914       </div>
2915       <div class="date">
2916         19th August 2015
2917       </div>
2918       <div class="body">
2919         <p>Today, finally, my first printed draft edition of the Norwegian
2920 translation of Free Culture I have been working on for the last few
2921 years arrived in the mail.  I had to fake a cover to get the interior
2922 printed, and the exterior of the book look awful, but that is
2923 irrelevant at this point.  I asked for a printed pocket book version
2924 to get an idea about the font sizes and paper format as well as how
2925 good the figures and images look in print, but also to test what the
2926 pocket book version would look like.  After receiving the 500 page
2927 pocket book, it became obvious to me that that pocket book size is too
2928 small for this book.  I believe the book is too thick, and several
2929 tables and figures do not look good in the size they get with that
2930 small page sizes.  I believe I will go with the 5.5x8.5 inch size
2931 instead.  A surprise discovery from the paper version was how bad the
2932 URLs look in print.  They are very hard to read in the colophon page.
2933 The URLs are red in the PDF, but light gray on paper.  I need to
2934 change the color of links somehow to look better.  But there is a
2935 printed book in my hand, and it feels great. :)</p>
2936
2937 <p>Now I only need to fix the cover, wrap up the postscript with the
2938 store behind the book, and collect the last corrections from the proof
2939 readers before the book is ready for proper printing.  Cover artists
2940 willing to work for free and create a Creative Commons licensed vector
2941 file looking similar to the original is most welcome, as my skills as
2942 a graphics designer are mostly missing.</p>
2943
2944       </div>
2945       <div class="tags">
2946
2947
2948         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>.
2949
2950
2951       </div>
2952     </div>
2953     <div class="padding"></div>
2954
2955     <div class="entry">
2956       <div class="title">
2957         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_paper_version_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_heading_my_way.html">First paper version of the Norwegian Free Culture book heading my way</a>
2958       </div>
2959       <div class="date">
2960          9th August 2015
2961       </div>
2962       <div class="body">
2963         <p>Typesetting a book is harder than I hoped.  As the translation is
2964 mostly done, and a volunteer proof reader was going to check the text
2965 on paper, it was time this summer to focus on formatting my translated
2966 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> based version of the
2967 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> book by Lawrence
2968 Lessig.  I've been trying to get both docboox-xsl+fop and dblatex to
2969 give me a good looking PDF, but in the end I went with dblatex, because
2970 its Debian maintainer and upstream developer were responsive and very
2971 helpful in solving my formatting challenges.</p>
2972
2973 <p>Last night, I finally managed to create a PDF that no longer made
2974 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/">Lulu.com</a> complain after uploading,
2975 and I ordered a text version of the book on paper.  It is lacking a
2976 proper book cover and is not tagged with the correct ISBN number, but
2977 should give me an idea what the finished book will look like.</p>
2978
2979 <p>Instead of using Lulu, I did consider printing the book using
2980 <a href="http://www.createspace.com/">CreateSpace</a>, but ended up
2981 using Lulu because it had smaller book size options (CreateSpace seem
2982 to lack pocket book with extended distribution).  I looked for a
2983 similar service in Norway, but have not seen anything so far.  Please
2984 let me know if I am missing out on something here.</p>
2985
2986 <p>But I still struggle to decide the book size.  Should I go for
2987 pocket book (4.25x6.875 inches / 10.8x17.5 cm) with 556 pages, Digest
2988 (5.5x8.5 inches / 14x21.6 cm) with 323 pages or US Trade (6x8 inches /
2989 15.3x22.9 cm) with 280 pages?  Fewer pager give a cheaper book, and a
2990 smaller book is easier to carry around.  The test book I ordered was
2991 pocket book sized, to give me an idea how well that fit in my hand,
2992 but I suspect I will end up using a digest sized book in the end to
2993 bring the prize down further.</p>
2994
2995 <p>My biggest challenge at the moment is making nice cover art.  My
2996 inkscape skills are not yet up to the task of replicating the original
2997 cover in SVG format.  I also need to figure out what to write about
2998 the book on the back (will most likely use the same text as the
2999 description on web based book stores).  I would love help with this,
3000 if you are willing to license the art source and final version using
3001 the same CC license as the book.  My artistic skills are not really up
3002 to the task.</p>
3003
3004 <p>I plan to publish the book in both English and Norwegian and on
3005 paper, in PDF form as well as EPUB and MOBI format.  The current
3006 status can as usual be found on
3007 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
3008 in the archive/ directory.  So far I have spent all time on making the
3009 PDF version look good.  Someone should probably do the same with the
3010 dbtoepub generated e-book.  Help is definitely needed here, as I
3011 expect to run out of steem before I find time to improve the epub
3012 formatting.</p>
3013
3014 <p>Please let me know via github if you find typos in the book or
3015 discover translations that should be improved.  The final proof
3016 reading is being done right now, and I expect to publish the finished
3017 result in a few months.</p>
3018
3019       </div>
3020       <div class="tags">
3021
3022
3023         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>.
3024
3025
3026       </div>
3027     </div>
3028     <div class="padding"></div>
3029
3030     <div class="entry">
3031       <div class="title">
3032         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_DocBook_footnotes_as_endnotes_with_dblatex.html">Typesetting DocBook footnotes as endnotes with dblatex</a>
3033       </div>
3034       <div class="date">
3035         16th July 2015
3036       </div>
3037       <div class="body">
3038         <p>I'm still working on the Norwegian version of the
3039 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture book by Lawrence
3040 Lessig</a>, and is now working on the final typesetting and layout.
3041 One of the features I want to get the structure similar to the
3042 original book is to typeset the footnotes as endnotes in the notes
3043 chapter.  Based on the
3044 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/685063">feedback from the Debian
3045 maintainer and the dblatex developer</a>, I came up with this recipe I
3046 would like to share with you.  The proposal was to create a new LaTeX
3047 class file and add the LaTeX code there, but this is not always
3048 practical, when I want to be able to replace the class using a make
3049 file variable.  So my proposal misuses the latex.begindocument XSL
3050 parameter value, to get a small fragment into the correct location in
3051 the generated LaTeX File.</p>
3052
3053 <p>First, decide where in the DocBook document to place the endnotes,
3054 and add this text there:</p>
3055
3056 <pre>
3057 &lt;?latex \theendnotes ?&gt;
3058 </pre>
3059
3060 <p>Next, create a xsl stylesheet file dblatex-endnotes.xsl to add the
3061 code needed to add the endnote instructions in the preamble of the
3062 generated LaTeX document, with content like this:</p>
3063
3064 <pre>
3065 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
3066 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
3067   &lt;xsl:param name="latex.begindocument"&gt;
3068     &lt;xsl:text&gt;
3069 \usepackage{endnotes}
3070 \let\footnote=\endnote
3071 \def\enoteheading{\mbox{}\par\vskip-\baselineskip }
3072 \begin{document}
3073     &lt;/xsl:text&gt;
3074   &lt;/xsl:param&gt;
3075 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
3076 </pre>
3077
3078 <p>Finally, load this xsl file when running dblatex, for example like
3079 this:</p>
3080
3081 <pre>
3082 dblatex --xsl-user=dblatex-endnotes.xsl freeculture.nb.xml
3083 </pre>
3084
3085 <p>The end result can be seen on github, where
3086 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
3087 book project</a> is located.</p>
3088
3089       </div>
3090       <div class="tags">
3091
3092
3093         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>.
3094
3095
3096       </div>
3097     </div>
3098     <div class="padding"></div>
3099
3100     <div class="entry">
3101       <div class="title">
3102         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MPEG_LA_on__Internet_Broadcast_AVC_Video__licensing_and_non_private_use.html">MPEG LA on "Internet Broadcast AVC Video" licensing and non-private use</a>
3103       </div>
3104       <div class="date">
3105          7th July 2015
3106       </div>
3107       <div class="body">
3108         <p>After asking the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK)
3109 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Hva_gj_r_at_NRK_kan_distribuere_H_264_video_uten_patentavtale_med_MPEG_LA_.html">why
3110 they can broadcast and stream H.264 video without an agreement with
3111 the MPEG LA</a>, I was wiser, but still confused.  So I asked MPEG LA
3112 if their understanding matched that of NRK.  As far as I can tell, it
3113 does not.</p>
3114
3115 <p>I started by asking for more information about the various
3116 licensing classes and what exactly is covered by the "Internet
3117 Broadcast AVC Video" class that NRK pointed me at to explain why NRK
3118 did not need a license for streaming H.264 video:
3119
3120 <p><blockquote>
3121
3122 <p>According to
3123 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/226/n-10-02-02.pdf">a
3124 MPEG LA press release dated 2010-02-02</a>, there is no charge when
3125 using MPEG AVC/H.264 according to the terms of "Internet Broadcast AVC
3126 Video".  I am trying to understand exactly what the terms of "Internet
3127 Broadcast AVC Video" is, and wondered if you could help me.  What
3128 exactly is covered by these terms, and what is not?</p>
3129
3130 <p>The only source of more information I have been able to find is a
3131 PDF named
3132 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcweb.pdf">AVC
3133 Patent Portfolio License Briefing</a>, which states this about the
3134 fees:</p>
3135
3136 <ul>
3137  <li>Where End User pays for AVC Video
3138   <ul>
3139    <li>Subscription (not limited by title) – 100,000 or fewer
3140      subscribers/yr = no royalty; &gt; 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers/yr =
3141      $25,000; &gt;250,000 to 500,000 subscribers/yr = $50,000; &gt;500,000 to
3142      1M subscribers/yr = $75,000; &gt;1M subscribers/yr = $100,000</li>
3143
3144    <li>Title-by-Title - 12 minutes or less = no royalty; &gt;12 minutes in
3145      length = lower of (a) 2% or (b) $0.02 per title</li>
3146   </ul></li>
3147
3148  <li>Where remuneration is from other sources
3149   <ul>
3150    <li>Free Television - (a) one-time $2,500 per transmission encoder or
3151      (b) annual fee starting at $2,500 for &gt; 100,000 HH rising to
3152      maximum $10,000 for &gt;1,000,000 HH</li>
3153
3154    <li>Internet Broadcast AVC Video (not title-by-title, not subscription)
3155      – no royalty for life of the AVC Patent Portfolio License</li>
3156   </ul></li>
3157 </ul>
3158
3159 <p>Am I correct in assuming that the four categories listed is the
3160 categories used when selecting licensing terms, and that "Internet
3161 Broadcast AVC Video" is the category for things that do not fall into
3162 one of the other three categories?  Can you point me to a good source
3163 explaining what is ment by "title-by-title" and "Free Television" in
3164 the license terms for AVC/H.264?</p>
3165
3166 <p>Will a web service providing H.264 encoded video content in a
3167 "video on demand" fashing similar to Youtube and Vimeo, where no
3168 subscription is required and no payment is required from end users to
3169 get access to the videos, fall under the terms of the "Internet
3170 Broadcast AVC Video", ie no royalty for life of the AVC Patent
3171 Portfolio license?  Does it matter if some users are subscribed to get
3172 access to personalized services?</p>
3173
3174 <p>Note, this request and all answers will be published on the
3175 Internet.</p>
3176 </blockquote></p>
3177
3178 <p>The answer came quickly from Benjamin J. Myers, Licensing Associate
3179 with the MPEG LA:</p>
3180
3181 <p><blockquote>
3182 <p>Thank you for your message and for your interest in MPEG LA.  We
3183 appreciate hearing from you and I will be happy to assist you.</p>
3184
3185 <p>As you are aware, MPEG LA offers our AVC Patent Portfolio License
3186 which provides coverage under patents that are essential for use of
3187 the AVC/H.264 Standard (MPEG-4 Part 10).  Specifically, coverage is
3188 provided for end products and video content that make use of AVC/H.264
3189 technology.  Accordingly, the party offering such end products and
3190 video to End Users concludes the AVC License and is responsible for
3191 paying the applicable royalties.</p>
3192
3193 <p>Regarding Internet Broadcast AVC Video, the AVC License generally
3194 defines such content to be video that is distributed to End Users over
3195 the Internet free-of-charge.  Therefore, if a party offers a service
3196 which allows users to upload AVC/H.264 video to its website, and such
3197 AVC Video is delivered to End Users for free, then such video would
3198 receive coverage under the sublicense for Internet Broadcast AVC
3199 Video, which is not subject to any royalties for the life of the AVC
3200 License.  This would also apply in the scenario where a user creates a
3201 free online account in order to receive a customized offering of free
3202 AVC Video content.  In other words, as long as the End User is given
3203 access to or views AVC Video content at no cost to the End User, then
3204 no royalties would be payable under our AVC License.</p>
3205
3206 <p>On the other hand, if End Users pay for access to AVC Video for a
3207 specific period of time (e.g., one month, one year, etc.), then such
3208 video would constitute Subscription AVC Video.  In cases where AVC
3209 Video is delivered to End Users on a pay-per-view basis, then such
3210 content would constitute Title-by-Title AVC Video.  If a party offers
3211 Subscription or Title-by-Title AVC Video to End Users, then they would
3212 be responsible for paying the applicable royalties you noted below.</p>
3213
3214 <p>Finally, in the case where AVC Video is distributed for free
3215 through an "over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission", then
3216 such content would constitute Free Television AVC Video and would be
3217 subject to the applicable royalties.</p>
3218
3219 <p>For your reference, I have attached
3220 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-07-07-mpegla.pdf">a
3221 .pdf copy of the AVC License</a>. You will find the relevant
3222 sublicense information regarding AVC Video in Sections 2.2 through
3223 2.5, and the corresponding royalties in Section 3.1.2 through 3.1.4.
3224 You will also find the definitions of Title-by-Title AVC Video,
3225 Subscription AVC Video, Free Television AVC Video, and Internet
3226 Broadcast AVC Video in Section 1 of the License.  Please note that the
3227 electronic copy is provided for informational purposes only and cannot
3228 be used for execution.</p>
3229
3230 <p>I hope the above information is helpful.  If you have additional
3231 questions or need further assistance with the AVC License, please feel
3232 free to contact me directly.</p>
3233 </blockquote></p>
3234
3235 <p>Having a fresh copy of the license text was useful, and knowing
3236 that the definition of Title-by-Title required payment per title made
3237 me aware that my earlier understanding of that phrase had been wrong.
3238 But I still had a few questions:</p>
3239
3240 <p><blockquote>
3241 <p>I have a small followup question.  Would it be possible for me to get
3242 a license with MPEG LA even if there are no royalties to be paid?  The
3243 reason I ask, is that some video related products have a copyright
3244 clause limiting their use without a license with MPEG LA.  The clauses
3245 typically look similar to this:
3246
3247 <p><blockquote>
3248   This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
3249   the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer to (a) encode
3250   video in compliance with the AVC standard ("AVC video") and/or (b)
3251   decode AVC video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a
3252   personal and non-commercial activity and/or AVC video that was
3253   obtained from a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No
3254   license is granted or shall be implied for any other use. additional
3255   information may be obtained from MPEG LA L.L.C.
3256 </blockquote></p>
3257
3258 <p>It is unclear to me if this clause mean that I need to enter into
3259 an agreement with MPEG LA to use the product in question, even if
3260 there are no royalties to be paid to MPEG LA.  I suspect it will
3261 differ depending on the jurisdiction, and mine is Norway.  What is
3262 MPEG LAs view on this?</p>
3263 </blockquote></p>
3264
3265 <p>According to the answer, MPEG LA believe those using such tools for
3266 non-personal or commercial use need a license with them:</p>
3267
3268 <p><blockquote>
3269
3270 <p>With regard to the Notice to Customers, I would like to begin by
3271 clarifying that the Notice from Section 7.1 of the AVC License
3272 reads:</p>
3273
3274 <p>THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR
3275 THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT
3276 RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC
3277 STANDARD ("AVC VIDEO") AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED
3278 BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM
3279 A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED
3280 OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE
3281 OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM</p>
3282
3283 <p>The Notice to Customers is intended to inform End Users of the
3284 personal usage rights (for example, to watch video content) included
3285 with the product they purchased, and to encourage any party using the
3286 product for commercial purposes to contact MPEG LA in order to become
3287 licensed for such use (for example, when they use an AVC Product to
3288 deliver Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free Television or Internet
3289 Broadcast AVC Video to End Users, or to re-Sell a third party's AVC
3290 Product as their own branded AVC Product).</p>
3291
3292 <p>Therefore, if a party is to be licensed for its use of an AVC
3293 Product to Sell AVC Video on a Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free
3294 Television or Internet Broadcast basis, that party would need to
3295 conclude the AVC License, even in the case where no royalties were
3296 payable under the License.  On the other hand, if that party (either a
3297 Consumer or business customer) simply uses an AVC Product for their
3298 own internal purposes and not for the commercial purposes referenced
3299 above, then such use would be included in the royalty paid for the AVC
3300 Products by the licensed supplier.</p>
3301
3302 <p>Finally, I note that our AVC License provides worldwide coverage in
3303 countries that have AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, including
3304 Norway.</p>
3305
3306 <p>I hope this clarification is helpful.  If I may be of any further
3307 assistance, just let me know.</p>
3308 </blockquote></p>
3309
3310 <p>The mentioning of Norwegian patents made me a bit confused, so I
3311 asked for more information:</p>
3312
3313 <p><blockquote>
3314
3315 <p>But one minor question at the end.  If I understand you correctly,
3316 you state in the quote above that there are patents in the AVC Patent
3317 Portfolio that are valid in Norway.  This make me believe I read the
3318 list available from &lt;URL:
3319 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx">http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx</a>
3320 &gt; incorrectly, as I believed the "NO" prefix in front of patents
3321 were Norwegian patents, and the only one I could find under Mitsubishi
3322 Electric Corporation expired in 2012.  Which patents are you referring
3323 to that are relevant for Norway?</p>
3324
3325 </blockquote></p>
3326
3327 <p>Again, the quick answer explained how to read the list of patents
3328 in that list:</p>
3329
3330 <p><blockquote>
3331
3332 <p>Your understanding is correct that the last AVC Patent Portfolio
3333 Patent in Norway expired on 21 October 2012.  Therefore, where AVC
3334 Video is both made and Sold in Norway after that date, then no
3335 royalties would be payable for such AVC Video under the AVC License.
3336 With that said, our AVC License provides historic coverage for AVC
3337 Products and AVC Video that may have been manufactured or Sold before
3338 the last Norwegian AVC patent expired.  I would also like to clarify
3339 that coverage is provided for the country of manufacture and the
3340 country of Sale that has active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents.</p>
3341
3342 <p>Therefore, if a party offers AVC Products or AVC Video for Sale in
3343 a country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents (for example,
3344 Sweden, Denmark, Finland, etc.), then that party would still need
3345 coverage under the AVC License even if such products or video are
3346 initially made in a country without active AVC Patent Portfolio
3347 Patents (for example, Norway).  Similarly, a party would need to
3348 conclude the AVC License if they make AVC Products or AVC Video in a
3349 country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, but eventually Sell
3350 such AVC Products or AVC Video in a country without active AVC Patent
3351 Portfolio Patents.</p>
3352 </blockquote></p>
3353
3354 <p>As far as I understand it, MPEG LA believe anyone using Adobe
3355 Premiere and other video related software with a H.264 distribution
3356 license need a license agreement with MPEG LA to use such tools for
3357 anything non-private or commercial, while it is OK to set up a
3358 Youtube-like service as long as no-one pays to get access to the
3359 content.  I still have no clear idea how this applies to Norway, where
3360 none of the patents MPEG LA is licensing are valid.  Will the
3361 copyright terms take precedence or can those terms be ignored because
3362 the patents are not valid in Norway?</p>
3363
3364       </div>
3365       <div class="tags">
3366
3367
3368         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
3369
3370
3371       </div>
3372     </div>
3373     <div class="padding"></div>
3374
3375     <div class="entry">
3376       <div class="title">
3377         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_laptop___some_more_clues_and_ideas_based_on_feedback.html">New laptop - some more clues and ideas based on feedback</a>
3378       </div>
3379       <div class="date">
3380          5th July 2015
3381       </div>
3382       <div class="body">
3383         <p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
3384 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback.  I wish to
3385 thank every one of these.  Several pointed me to the possibility of
3386 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
3387 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
3388 machine.  But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
3389 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
3390 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement.  If I did
3391 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
3392 using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
3393 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
3394
3395 <p>One tip I got was to use the
3396 <a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
3397 compare laptop models.  It seem to have more models available than
3398 prisjakt.no.  Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
3399 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
3400 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
3401 keyboards I tested.  Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
3402
3403 <p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
3404 newest Thinkpad X model.  The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
3405 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
3406 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
3407 <a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>.  The reports I
3408 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent.  Some say the keyboard
3409 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
3410 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
3411 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
3412 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
3413 replace it.  I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
3414 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230.  I'm
3415 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
3416 noisy.  In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
3417 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
3418
3419 <p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
3420 <a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
3421 <a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
3422 The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
3423
3424 <p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback.  It help a lot
3425 as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
3426
3427 <p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
3428 <a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops.  They got several
3429 different
3430 <a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
3431 thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
3432
3433       </div>
3434       <div class="tags">
3435
3436
3437         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>.
3438
3439
3440       </div>
3441     </div>
3442     <div class="padding"></div>
3443
3444     <div class="entry">
3445       <div class="title">
3446         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_find_a_new_laptop__as_the_old_one_is_broken_after_only_two_years.html">Time to find a new laptop, as the old one is broken after only two years</a>
3447       </div>
3448       <div class="date">
3449          3rd July 2015
3450       </div>
3451       <div class="body">
3452         <p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
3453 replacement soon.  The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
3454 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
3455 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
3456 flickering.</p>
3457
3458 <p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
3459 still as
3460 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
3461 described them in 2013</a>.  The last time I bought a laptop, I had
3462 good help from
3463 <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
3464 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
3465 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually.  Three button mouse
3466 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
3467 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
3468 G2) lack three mouse buttons).  It is also unclear to me how good the
3469 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are.  I hope Lenovo have not messed up
3470 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
3471 deteriorated since X41.</p>
3472
3473 <p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
3474 seem sensible to me?  Are there better services around to search the
3475 set of available laptops for features?  Please send me an email if you
3476 have suggestions.</p>
3477
3478 <p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
3479 <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
3480 of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
3481
3482       </div>
3483       <div class="tags">
3484
3485
3486         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>.
3487
3488
3489       </div>
3490     </div>
3491     <div class="padding"></div>
3492
3493     <div class="entry">
3494       <div class="title">
3495         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MakerCon_Nordic_videos_now_available_on_Frikanalen.html">MakerCon Nordic videos now available on Frikanalen</a>
3496       </div>
3497       <div class="date">
3498          2nd July 2015
3499       </div>
3500       <div class="body">
3501         <p>Last oktober I was involved on behalf of
3502 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> with recording the talks at
3503 <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">MakerCon Nordic</a>, a conference for
3504 the Maker movement.  Since then it has been the plan to publish the
3505 recordings on <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, which
3506 finally happened the last few days.  A few talks are missing because
3507 the speakers asked the organizers to not publish them, but most of the
3508 talks are available.  The talks are being broadcasted on RiksTV
3509 channel 50 and using multicast on Uninett, as well as being available
3510 from the Frikanalen web site.  The unedited recordings are
3511 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">available on
3512 Youtube too</a>.</p>
3513
3514 <p>This is the list of talks available at the moment.  Visit the
3515 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/?q=makercon">Frikanalen video
3516 pages</a> to view them.</p>
3517
3518 <ul>
3519
3520   <li>Evolutionary algorithms as a design tool - from art
3521       to robotics (Kyrre Glette)</li>
3522
3523   <li>Make and break (Hans Gerhard Meier)</li>
3524
3525   <li>Making a one year school course for young makers
3526       (Olav Helland)</li>
3527
3528   <li>Innovation Inspiration - IPR Databases as a Source of
3529       Inspiration (Hege Langlo)</li>
3530
3531   <li>Making a toy for makers (Erik Torstensson)</li>
3532
3533   <li>How to make 3D printer electronics (Elias Bakken)</li>
3534
3535   <li>Hovering Clouds: Looking at online tool offerings for Product
3536       Design and 3D Printing (William Kempton)</li>
3537
3538   <li>Travelling maker stories (Øyvind Nydal Dahl)</li>
3539
3540   <li>Making the first Maker Faire in Sweden (Nils Olander)</li>
3541
3542   <li>Breaking the mold: Printing 1000’s of parts (Espen Sivertsen)</li>
3543
3544   <li>Ultimaker — and open source 3D printing (Erik de Bruijn)</li>
3545
3546   <li>Autodesk’s 3D Printing Platform: Sparking innovation (Hilde
3547       Sevens)</li>
3548
3549   <li>How Making is Changing the World – and How You Can Too!
3550       (Jennifer Turliuk)</li>
3551
3552   <li>Open-Source Adventuring: OpenROV, OpenExplorer and the Future of
3553       Connected Exploration (David Lang)</li>
3554
3555   <li>Making in Norway (Haakon Karlsen Jr., Graham Hayward and Jens
3556       Dyvik)</li>
3557
3558   <li>The Impact of the Maker Movement (Mike Senese)</li>
3559
3560 </ul>
3561
3562 <p>Part of the reason this took so long was that the scripts NUUG had
3563 to prepare a recording for publication were five years old and no
3564 longer worked with the current video processing tools (command line
3565 argument changes).  In addition, we needed better audio normalization,
3566 which sent me on a detour to
3567 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html">package
3568 bs1770gain for Debian</a>.  Now this is in place and it became a lot
3569 easier to publish NUUG videos on Frikanalen.</p>
3570
3571       </div>
3572       <div class="tags">
3573
3574
3575         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>.
3576
3577
3578       </div>
3579     </div>
3580     <div class="padding"></div>
3581
3582     <div class="entry">
3583       <div class="title">
3584         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Graphing_the_Norwegian_company_ownership_structure.html">Graphing the Norwegian company ownership structure</a>
3585       </div>
3586       <div class="date">
3587         15th June 2015
3588       </div>
3589       <div class="body">
3590         <p>It is a bit work to figure out the ownership structure of companies
3591 in Norway.  The information is publicly available, but one need to
3592 recursively look up ownership for all owners to figure out the complete
3593 ownership graph of a given set of companies.  To save me the work in
3594 the future, I wrote a script to do this automatically, outputting the
3595 ownership structure using the Graphviz/dotty format.  The data source
3596 is web scraping from <a href="http://www.proff.no/">Proff</a>, because
3597 I failed to find a useful source directly from the official keepers of
3598 the ownership data, <a href="http://www.brreg.no/">Brønnøysundsregistrene</a>.</p>
3599
3600 <p>To get an ownership graph for a set of companies, fetch
3601 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/brreg-norway-ownership-graph">the code from git</a> and run it using the organisation number.  I'm
3602 using the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet as an example here, as its
3603 ownership structure is very simple:</p>
3604
3605 <pre>
3606 % time ./bin/eierskap-dotty 958033540 > dagbladet.dot
3607
3608 real    0m2.841s
3609 user    0m0.184s
3610 sys     0m0.036s
3611 %
3612 </pre>
3613
3614 <p>The script accept several organisation numbers on the command line,
3615 allowing a cluster of companies to be graphed in the same image.  The
3616 resulting dot file for the example above look like this.  The edges
3617 are labeled with the ownership percentage, and the nodes uses the
3618 organisation number as their name and the name as the label:</p>
3619
3620 <pre>
3621 digraph ownership {
3622 rankdir = LR;
3623 "Aller Holding A/s" -> "910119877" [label="100%"]
3624 "910119877" -> "998689015" [label="100%"]
3625 "998689015" -> "958033540" [label="99%"]
3626 "974530600" -> "958033540" [label="1%"]
3627 "958033540" [label="AS DAGBLADET"]
3628 "998689015" [label="Berner Media Holding AS"]
3629 "974530600" [label="Dagbladets Stiftelse"]
3630 "910119877" [label="Aller Media AS"]
3631 }
3632 </pre>
3633
3634 <p>To view the ownership graph, run "<tt>dotty dagbladet.dot</tt>" or
3635 convert it to a PNG using "<tt>dot -T png dagbladet.dot >
3636 dagbladet.png</tt>".  The result can be seen below:</p>
3637
3638 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-06-15-ownership-graphs-norway-dagbladet.png" width="80%">
3639
3640 <p>Note that I suspect the "Aller Holding A/S" entry to be incorrect
3641 data in the official ownership register, as that name is not
3642 registered in the official company register for Norway.  The ownership
3643 register is sensitive to typos and there seem to be no strict checking
3644 of the ownership links.</p>
3645
3646 <p>Let me know if you improve the script or find better data sources.
3647 The code is licensed according to GPL 2 or newer.</p>
3648
3649 <p>Update 2015-06-15: Since the initial post I've been told that
3650 "<a href="http://www.proff.dk/firma/carl-allers-etablissement-aktieselskab/københavn-v/hovedkontorer/13624518-3/">Aller
3651 Holding A/S</a>" is a Danish company, which explain why it did not
3652 have a Norwegian organisation number.  I've also been told that there
3653 is a <a href="http://www.brreg.no/automatiske/webservices/">web
3654 services API available</a> from Brønnøysundsregistrene, for those
3655 willing to accept the terms or pay the price.</p>
3656
3657       </div>
3658       <div class="tags">
3659
3660
3661         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
3662
3663
3664       </div>
3665     </div>
3666     <div class="padding"></div>
3667
3668     <div class="entry">
3669       <div class="title">
3670         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html">Measuring and adjusting the loudness of a TV channel using bs1770gain</a>
3671       </div>
3672       <div class="date">
3673         11th June 2015
3674       </div>
3675       <div class="body">
3676         <p>Television loudness is the source of frustration for viewers
3677 everywhere.  Some channels are very load, others are less loud, and
3678 ads tend to shout very high to get the attention of the viewers, and
3679 the viewers do not like this.  This fact is well known to the TV
3680 channels.  See for example the BBC white paper
3681 "<a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp-pdf-files/WHP202.pdf">Terminology
3682 for loudness and level dBTP, LU, and all that</a>" from 2011 for a
3683 summary of the problem domain.  To better address the need for even
3684 loadness, the TV channels got together several years ago to agree on a
3685 new way to measure loudness in digital files as one step in
3686 standardizing loudness.  From this came the ITU-R standard BS.1770,
3687 "<a href="http://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-BS.1770/en">Algorithms to
3688 measure audio programme loudness and true-peak audio level</a>".</p>
3689
3690 <p>The ITU-R BS.1770 specification describe an algorithm to measure
3691 loadness in LUFS (Loudness Units, referenced to Full Scale). But
3692 having a way to measure is not enough.  To get the same loudness
3693 across TV channels, one also need to decide which value to standardize
3694 on.  For European TV channels, this was done in the EBU Recommondaton
3695 R128, "<a href="https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf">Loudness
3696 normalisation and permitted maximum level of audio signals</a>", which
3697 specifies a recommended level of -23 LUFS.  In Norway, I have been
3698 told that NRK, TV2, MTG and SBS have decided among themselves to
3699 follow the R128 recommondation for playout from 2016-03-01.</p>
3700
3701 <p>There are free software available to measure and adjust the loudness
3702 level using the LUFS.  In Debian, I am aware of a library named
3703 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libebur128">libebur128</a>
3704 able to measure the loudness and since yesterday morning a new binary
3705 named <a href="http://bs1770gain.sourceforge.net">bs1770gain</a>
3706 capable of both measuring and adjusting was uploaded and is waiting
3707 for NEW processing.  I plan to maintain the latter in Debian under the
3708 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=pkg-multimedia-maintainers%40lists.alioth.debian.org">Debian
3709 multimedia</a> umbrella.</p>
3710
3711 <p>The free software based TV channel I am involved in,
3712 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, plan to follow the
3713 R128 recommondation ourself as soon as we can adjust the software to
3714 do so, and the bs1770gain tool seem like a good fit for that part of
3715 the puzzle to measure loudness on new video uploaded to Frikanalen.
3716 Personally, I plan to use bs1770gain to adjust the loudness of videos
3717 I upload to Frikanalen on behalf of <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
3718 NUUG member organisation</a>.  The program seem to be able to measure
3719 the LUFS value of any media file handled by ffmpeg, but I've only
3720 successfully adjusted the LUFS value of WAV files.  I suspect it
3721 should be able to adjust it for all the formats handled by ffmpeg.</p>
3722
3723       </div>
3724       <div class="tags">
3725
3726
3727         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>.
3728
3729
3730       </div>
3731     </div>
3732     <div class="padding"></div>
3733
3734     <div class="entry">
3735       <div class="title">
3736         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_citizens_now_required_by_law_to_give_their_fingerprint_to_the_police.html">Norwegian citizens now required by law to give their fingerprint to the police</a>
3737       </div>
3738       <div class="date">
3739         10th May 2015
3740       </div>
3741       <div class="body">
3742         <p>5 days ago, the Norwegian Parliament decided, unanimously, that all
3743 citizens of Norway, no matter if they are suspected of something
3744 criminal or not, are
3745 <a href="https://www.holderdeord.no/votes/1430838871e">required to
3746 give fingerprints to the police</a> (vote details from Holder de
3747 ord).  The law make it sound like it will be optional, but in a few
3748 years there will be no option any more.  The ID will be required to
3749 vote, to get a bank account, a bank card, to change address on the
3750 post office, to receive an electronic ID or to get a drivers license
3751 and many other tasks required to function in Norway.  The banks plan
3752 to stop providing their own ID on the bank cards when this new
3753 national ID is introduced, and the national road authorities plan to
3754 change the drivers license to no longer be usable as identity cards.
3755 In effect, to function as a citizen in Norway a national ID card will
3756 be required, and to get it one need to provide the fingerprints to
3757 the police.</p>
3758
3759 <p>In addition to handing the fingerprint to the police (which
3760 promised to not make a copy of the fingerprint image at that point in
3761 time, but say nothing about doing it later), a picture of the
3762 fingerprint will be stored on the RFID chip, along with a picture of
3763 the face and other information about the person.  Some of the
3764 information will be encrypted, but the encryption will be the same
3765 system as currently used in the passports.  The codes to decrypt will
3766 be available to a lot of government offices and their suppliers around
3767 the globe, but for those that do not know anyone in those circles it
3768 is good to know that
3769 <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/nov/17/news.homeaffairs">the
3770 encryption is already broken</a>.  And they
3771 <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/article/2215057/wireless/bad-guys-could-read-rfid-passports-at-217-feet--maybe-a-lot-more.html">can
3772 be read from 70 meters away</a>.  This can be mitigated a bit by
3773 keeping it in a Faraday cage (metal box or metal wire container), but
3774 one will be required to take it out of there often enough to expose
3775 ones private and personal information to a lot of people that have no
3776 business getting access to that information.</p>
3777
3778 <p>The new Norwegian national IDs are a vehicle for identity theft,
3779 and I feel sorry for us all having politicians accepting such invasion
3780 of privacy without any objections.  So are the Norwegian passports,
3781 but it has been possible to function in Norway without those so far.
3782 That option is going away with the passing of the new law.  In this, I
3783 envy the Germans, because for them it is optional how much biometric
3784 information is stored in their national ID.</p>
3785
3786 <p>And if forced collection of fingerprints was not bad enough, the
3787 information collected in the national ID card register can be handed
3788 over to foreign intelligence services and police authorities, "when
3789 extradition is not considered disproportionate".</p>
3790
3791 <p>Update 2015-05-12: For those unable to believe that the Parliament
3792 really could make such decision, I wrote
3793 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Blir_det_virkelig_krav_om_fingeravtrykk_i_nasjonale_ID_kort_.html">a
3794 summary of the sources I have</a> for concluding the way I do
3795 (Norwegian Only, as the sources are all in Norwegian).</p>
3796
3797       </div>
3798       <div class="tags">
3799
3800
3801         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
3802
3803
3804       </div>
3805     </div>
3806     <div class="padding"></div>
3807
3808     <div class="entry">
3809       <div class="title">
3810         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_would_it_cost_to_store_all_phone_calls_in_Norway_.html">What would it cost to store all phone calls in Norway?</a>
3811       </div>
3812       <div class="date">
3813          1st May 2015
3814       </div>
3815       <div class="body">
3816         <p>Many years ago, a friend of mine calculated how much it would cost
3817 to store the sound of all phone calls in Norway, and came up with the
3818 cost of around 20 million NOK (2.4 mill EUR) for all the calls in a
3819 year.  I got curious and wondered what the same calculation would look
3820 like today.  To do so one need an idea of how much data storage is
3821 needed for each minute of sound, how many minutes all the calls in
3822 Norway sums up to, and the cost of data storage.</p>
3823
3824 <p>The 2005 numbers are from
3825 <a href="http://www.digi.no/analyser/2005/10/04/vi-prater-stadig-mindre-i-roret">digi.no</a>,
3826 the 2012 numbers are from
3827 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/aktuelt/nyheter/fortsatt-vekst-i-det-norske-ekommarkedet">a
3828 NKOM report</a>, and I got the 2013 numbers after asking NKOM via
3829 email.  I was told the numbers for 2014 will be presented May 20th,
3830 and decided not to wait for those, as I doubt they will be very
3831 different from the numbers from 2013.</p>
3832
3833 <p>The amount of data storage per minute sound depend on the wanted
3834 quality, and for phone calls it is generally believed that 8 Kbit/s is
3835 enough.  See for example a
3836 <a href="http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice-quality/7934-bwidth-consume.html#topic1">summary
3837 on voice quality from Cisco</a> for some alternatives.  8 Kbit/s is 60
3838 Kbytes/min, and this can be multiplied with the number of call minutes
3839 to get the storage requirements.</p>
3840
3841 <p>Storage prices varies a lot, depending on speed, backup strategies,
3842 availability requirements etc.  But a simple way to calculate can be
3843 to use the price of a TiB-disk (around 1000 NOK / 120 EUR) and double
3844 it to take space, power and redundancy into account.  It could be much
3845 higher with high speed and good redundancy requirements.</p>
3846
3847 <p>But back to the question, What would it cost to store all phone
3848 calls in Norway?  Not much.  Here is a small table showing the
3849 estimated cost, which is within the budget constraint of most medium
3850 and large organisations:</p>
3851
3852 <table border="1">
3853 <tr><th>Year</th><th>Call minutes</th><th>Size</th><th>Price in NOK / EUR</th></tr>
3854 <tr><td>2005</td><td align="right">24 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.3 PiB</td><td align="right">3 mill / 358 000</td></tr>
3855 <tr><td>2012</td><td align="right">18 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.0 PiB</td><td align="right">2.2 mill / 262 000</td></tr>
3856 <tr><td>2013</td><td align="right">17 000 000 000</td><td align="right">950 TiB</td><td align="right">2.1 mill / 250 000</td></tr>
3857 </table>
3858
3859 <p>This is the cost of buying the storage.  Maintenance need to be
3860 taken into account too, but calculating that is left as an exercise
3861 for the reader.  But it is obvious to me from those numbers that
3862 recording the sound of all phone calls in Norway is not going to be
3863 stopped because it is too expensive.  I wonder if someone already is
3864 collecting the data?</p>
3865
3866       </div>
3867       <div class="tags">
3868
3869
3870         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
3871
3872
3873       </div>
3874     </div>
3875     <div class="padding"></div>
3876
3877     <div class="entry">
3878       <div class="title">
3879         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_beta_release.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu beta release</a>
3880       </div>
3881       <div class="date">
3882         26th April 2015
3883       </div>
3884       <div class="body">
3885         <p>I am happy to report that the Debian Edu team sent out
3886 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2015/04/msg00000.html">this
3887 announcement today</a>:</p>
3888
3889 <pre>
3890 the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is pleased to announce the first
3891 *beta* release of Debian Edu "Jessie" 8.0+edu0~b1, which for the first
3892 time is composed entirely of packages from the current Debian stable
3893 release, Debian 8 "Jessie".
3894
3895 (As most reading this will know, Debian "Jessie" hasn't actually been
3896 released by now. The release is still in progress but should finish
3897 later today ;)
3898
3899 We expect to make a final release of Debian Edu "Jessie" in the coming
3900 weeks, timed with the first point release of Debian Jessie. Upgrades
3901 from this beta release of Debian Edu Jessie to the final release will
3902 be possible and encouraged!
3903
3904 Please report feedback to debian-edu@lists.debian.org and/or submit
3905 bugs: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
3906
3907 Debian Edu - sometimes also known as "Skolelinux" - is a complete
3908 operating system for schools, universities and other
3909 organisations. Through its pre- prepared installation profiles
3910 administrators can install servers, workstations and laptops which
3911 will work in harmony on the school network.  With Debian Edu, the
3912 teachers themselves or their technical support staff can roll out a
3913 complete multi-user, multi-machine study environment within hours or
3914 days.
3915
3916 Debian Edu is already in use at several hundred schools all over the
3917 world, particularly in Germany, Spain and Norway. Installations come
3918 with hundreds of applications pre-installed, plus the whole Debian
3919 archive of thousands of compatible packages within easy reach.
3920
3921 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
3922 installation instructions are available, including detailed
3923 instructions in the manual explaining the first steps, such as setting
3924 up a network or adding users.  Please note that the password for the
3925 user your prompted for during installation must have a length of at
3926 least 5 characters!
3927
3928 == Where to download ==
3929
3930 A multi-architecture CD / usbstick image (649 MiB) for network booting
3931 can be downloaded at the following locations:
3932
3933     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso
3934     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso .
3935
3936 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 54a524d16246cddd8d2cfd6ea52f2dd78c47ee0a
3937
3938 Alternatively an extended DVD / usbstick image (4.9 GiB) is also
3939 available, with more software included (saving additional download
3940 time):
3941
3942     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
3943     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
3944
3945 The SHA1SUM of this image is: fb1f1504a490c077a48653898f9d6a461cb3c636
3946
3947 Sources are available from the Debian archive, see
3948 http://ftp.debian.org/debian-cd/8.0.0/source/ for some download
3949 options.
3950
3951 == Debian Edu Jessie manual in seven languages ==
3952
3953 Please see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/ for
3954 the English version of the Debian Edu jessie manual.
3955
3956 This manual has been fully translated to German, French, Italian,
3957 Danish, Dutch and Norwegian Bokmål. A partly translated version exists
3958 for Spanish.  See http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/ for
3959 online version of the translated manual.
3960
3961 More information about Debian 8 "Jessie" itself is provided in the
3962 release notes and the installation manual:
3963 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
3964 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
3965
3966
3967 == Errata / known problems ==
3968
3969     It takes up to 15 minutes for a changed hostname to be updated via
3970     DHCP (#780461).
3971
3972     The hostname script fails to update LTSP server hostname (#783087).
3973
3974 Workaround: run update-hostname-from-ip on the client to update the
3975 hostname immediately.
3976
3977 Check https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie for a possibly
3978 more current and complete list.
3979
3980 == Some more details about Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~b1 Codename Jessie released 2015-04-25 ==
3981
3982 === Software updates ===
3983
3984 Everything which is new in Debian 8 Jessie, e.g.:
3985
3986  * Linux kernel 3.16.7-ctk9; for the i386 architecture, support for
3987    i486 processors has been dropped; oldest supported ones: i586 (like
3988    Intel Pentium and AMD K5).
3989
3990  * Desktop environments KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11.13, GNOME 3.14,
3991    Xfce 4.12, LXDE 0.5.6
3992    * new optional desktop environment: MATE 1.8
3993    * KDE Plasma Workspaces is installed by default; to choose one of
3994      the others see the manual.
3995  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 41
3996  * LibreOffice 4.3.3
3997  * GOsa 2.7.4
3998  * LTSP 5.5.4
3999  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
4000  * new boot framework: systemd
4001  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.12
4002  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
4003  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
4004  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.1
4005  * golearn 0.9
4006  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
4007  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
4008  * Debian Jessie includes about 43000 packages available for installation.
4009  * More information about Debian 8 Jessie is provided in its release
4010    notes and the installation manual, see the link above.
4011
4012 === Installation changes ===
4013
4014     Installations done via PXE now also install firmware automatically
4015     for the hardware present.
4016
4017 === Fixed bugs ===
4018
4019 A number of bugs have been fixed in this release; the most noticeable
4020 from a user perspective:
4021
4022  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
4023    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
4024    information is corrected (710362)
4025
4026  * shutdown-at-night now shuts the system down if gdm3 is used (775608).
4027
4028 === Sugar desktop removed ===
4029
4030 As the Sugar desktop was removed from Debian Jessie, it is also not
4031 available in Debian Edu jessie.
4032
4033
4034 == About Debian Edu / Skolelinux ==
4035
4036 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on
4037 Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
4038 configured school network. Directly after installation a school server
4039 running all services needed for a school network is set up just
4040 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
4041 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
4042 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
4043 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
4044 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
4045 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
4046 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
4047 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
4048 can choose between KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
4049 environment.
4050
4051 == About Debian ==
4052
4053 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
4054 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
4055 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
4056 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
4057 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
4058 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
4059 operating system.
4060
4061 == Thanks ==
4062
4063 Thanks to everyone making Debian and Debian Edu / Skolelinux happen!
4064 You rock.
4065 </pre>
4066
4067       </div>
4068       <div class="tags">
4069
4070
4071         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>.
4072
4073
4074       </div>
4075     </div>
4076     <div class="padding"></div>
4077
4078     <div class="entry">
4079       <div class="title">
4080         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Shirish_Agarwal.html">Debian Edu interview: Shirish Agarwal</a>
4081       </div>
4082       <div class="date">
4083         15th April 2015
4084       </div>
4085       <div class="body">
4086         <p>It was a surprise to me to learn that project to create a complete
4087 computer system for schools I've involved in,
4088 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, was
4089 being used in India.  But apparently it is, and I managed to get an
4090 interview with one of the friends of the project there, Shirish
4091 Agarwal.</p>
4092
4093 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
4094
4095 <p>My name is Shirish Agarwal. Based out of the educational and
4096 historical city of Pune, from the western state of Maharashtra, India.
4097 My bread comes from giving training, giving policy tips,
4098 installations on free software to mom and pop shops in different
4099 fields from Desktop publishing to retail shops as well as work with
4100 few software start-ups as well.</p>
4101
4102 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
4103 project?</strong></p>
4104
4105 <p>It started innocently enough. I have been using Debian for a few
4106 years and in one local minidebconf / debutsav I was asked if there was
4107 anything for schools or education. I had worked / played with free
4108 educational softwares such as Gcompris and Stellarium for my many
4109 nieces and nephews so researched and found Debian Edu or Skolelinux as
4110 it was known then.  Since then I have started using the various
4111 education meta-packages provided by the project.</p>
4112
4113 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
4114 Edu?</strong></p>
4115
4116 <p>It's closest I have seen where a package full of educational
4117 software are packed, which are free and open (both literally and
4118 figuratively).  Even if I take the simplest software which is
4119 gcompris, the number of activities therein are amazing. Another one of
4120 the softwares that I have liked for a long time is stellarium. Even
4121 pysycache is cool except for couple of issues I encountered
4122 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781841">#781841</a> and
4123 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781842">#781842</a>.</p>
4124
4125 <p>I prefer software installed on the system over web based solutions,
4126 as a web site can disappear any time but the software on disk has the
4127 possibility of a larger life span.  Of course with both it's more a
4128 question if it has enough users who make it fun or sustainable or both
4129 for the developer per-se.</p>
4130
4131 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
4132 Edu?</strong></p>
4133
4134 <p>I do see that the Debian Edu team seems to be short-handed and I
4135 think more efforts should be made to make it popular and ask and take
4136 help from people and the larger community wherever possible.</p>
4137
4138 <p>I don't see any disadvantage to use Skolelinux apart from the fact
4139 that most apps. are generic which is good or bad how you see it.
4140 However, saying that I do acknowledge the fact that the canvas is
4141 pretty big and there are lot of interesting ideas that could be done
4142 but for reasons not known not done or if done I don't know about them.
4143 Let me share some of the ideas (these are more upstream based but
4144 still) I have had for a long time :</p>
4145
4146 <p>1. Classical maths question of two trains in opposing directions
4147 each running @x kmph/mph at y distance, when they will meet and how
4148 far would each travel and similar questions like these.
4149
4150 <p>The computer is a fantastic system where questions like these can
4151 be drawn, animated and the methodology and answers teased out in
4152 interactive manner. While sites such as the
4153 <a href="http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.two.trains.html">Ask
4154 Dr. Math FAQ on The Two Trains problem</a> (as an example or point of
4155 inspiration) can be used there is lot more that can be done.  I dunno
4156 if there is a free software which does something like this.  The idea
4157 being a blend of objects + animation + interaction which does
4158 this. The whole interaction could be gamified with points or sounds or
4159 colourful celebration whenever the user gets even part of the question
4160 or/and methodology right. That would help reinforce good behaviour.
4161 This understanding could be used to share/showcase everything from how
4162 the first wheel came to be, to evolution to how astronomy started,
4163 psychics and everything in-between.</p>
4164
4165 <p>One specific idea in the train part was having the Linux mascot on
4166 one train and the BSD or GNU mascot on the other train and they
4167 meeting somewhere in-between. Characters from blender movies could
4168 also be used.</p>
4169
4170 <p>2. Loads of crossword-puzzles with reference to subjects: We have
4171 enormous data sets in Wikipedia and Wikitionary.  I don't think it
4172 should be a big job to design crossword puzzles. Using categories and
4173 sub-categories it should be doable to have Q&A single word answers
4174 from the existing data-sets. What would make it easy or hard could be
4175 the length of the word + existence of many or few vowels depending on
4176 the user's input.</p>
4177
4178 <p>3. Jigsaw puzzles - We already have a great software called
4179 palapeli with number of slicers making it pretty interesting. What
4180 needs to be done is to download large number of public domain and
4181 copyleft images, tease and use IPTC tags to categorise them into
4182 nature, history etc.  and let it loose. This could turn to be really
4183 huge collection of images. One source could be taken from
4184 commons.wikimedia.org, others could be huge collection of royalty-free
4185 stock photos. Potential is immense.</p>
4186
4187 <p>Apart from this, free software suffers in two directions, we lag
4188 both in development (of using new features per-se) and maintenance a
4189 lot.  This is more so in educational software as these applications
4190 need to be timely and the opportunity cost of missing deadlines is
4191 immense. If we are able to solve issues of funding for development and
4192 maintenance of such software I don't see any big difficulties. I know
4193 of few start-ups in and around India who would love to develop and
4194 maintain such software if funding issues could be solved.</p>
4195
4196 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
4197
4198 <p>That would be huge list. Some of the softwares are obviously apt,
4199 aptitude, debdelta, leafpad, the shell of course (zsh nowadays),
4200 quassel for IRC. In games I use shisen-sho while card-games are evenly
4201 between kpat and Aiselriot.  In desktops it's a tie between
4202 gnome-flashback and mate.</p>
4203
4204 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
4205 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
4206
4207 <p>I think it should first start with using specific FOSS apps. in
4208 whatever environment they are. If it's MS-Windows or Mac so be it.
4209 Once they are habitual with the apps. and there is buy-in from the
4210 school management then it could be installed anywhere. Most of the
4211 people now understand the concept of a repository because of the
4212 various online stores so it isn't hard to convince on that front.</p>
4213
4214 <p>What is harder is having enough people with technical skills and
4215 passion to service them. If you get buy-in from one or two teachers
4216 then ideas like above could also be asked to be done as a project as
4217 well.</p>
4218
4219 <p>I think where we fall short more than anything is in marketing. For
4220 instance, Debian has this whole range of fonts in its archive but
4221 there isn't even a page where all those different fonts in the La
4222 Ipsum format could be tried out for newcomers.</p>
4223
4224 <p>One of the issues faced constantly in installations is with updates
4225 and upgrades.  People have this myth that each update and upgrade
4226 means the user interface will / has to change. I have seen this
4227 innumerable times.  That perhaps is one of the reasons which browsers
4228 like Iceweasel / Firefox change user interfaces so much, not because
4229 it might be needed or be functional but because people believe that
4230 changed user interfaces are better. This, can easily be pointed with
4231 the user interfaces changed with almost every MS-Windows and Mac OS
4232 releases.</p>
4233
4234 <p>The problems with Debian Edu for deployment are many. The biggest
4235 is the huge gap between what is taught in schools and what Debian Edu
4236 is aimed at.
4237
4238 <p>Me and my friends did teach on week-ends in a government school for
4239 around 2 years, and
4240 <a href="https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/sharings/">gathered
4241 some experience</a> there.  Some of the things we learnt/discovered
4242 there was :</p>
4243
4244 <ol>
4245
4246   <li>Most of the teachers are very territorial about their subjects
4247    and they do not want you to teach anything out of the
4248    portion/syllabus given.</li>
4249
4250   <li>They want any activity on the system in accordance to whatever
4251    is in the syllabus.</li>
4252
4253   <li>There are huge barriers both with the English language and at
4254    times with objects or whatever. An example, let's say in gcompris
4255    you have objects falling down and you have to name them and let's
4256    say the falling object is a hat or a fedora hat, this would not be
4257    as recognizable as say a
4258    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puneri_Pagadi">Puneri
4259    Pagdi</a> so there is need to inject local objects, words wherever
4260    possible. Especially for word-games there are so many hindi words
4261    which have become part of english vocabulary (for instance in
4262    parley), those could be made into a hinglish collection or
4263    something but that is something for upstream to do.</li>
4264
4265 </ol>
4266
4267       </div>
4268       <div class="tags">
4269
4270
4271         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>.
4272
4273
4274       </div>
4275     </div>
4276     <div class="padding"></div>
4277
4278     <div class="entry">
4279       <div class="title">
4280         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_m_going_to_the_Open_Source_Developers__Conference_Nordic_2015_.html">I'm going to the Open Source Developers' Conference Nordic 2015!</a>
4281       </div>
4282       <div class="date">
4283          7th April 2015
4284       </div>
4285       <div class="body">
4286         <p>I am happy to let you all know that I'm going to the <a
4287 href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/">Open Source Developers'
4288 Conference Nordic 2015</a>!</p>
4289
4290 <p>It take place Friday 8th to Sunday 10th of May in Oslo next to
4291 where I work, and I finally got around to submitting
4292 <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talk/6192">a talk proposal for
4293 it</a> (dead link for most people until the talk is accepted).  As
4294 part of my involvement with the
4295 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group member
4296 association</a> I have been slightly involved in the planning of this
4297 conference for a while now, with a focus on organising a Civic Hacking
4298 Hackathon with our friends
4299 over at <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> and
4300 <a href="http://www.holderdeord.no/">Holder de ord</a>.  This part is
4301 named the 'My Society' track in the program.  There is still space for
4302 more talks and participants.  I hope to see you there.</p>
4303
4304 <p>Check out <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talks">the talks
4305 submitted and accepted so far</a>.</p>
4306
4307       </div>
4308       <div class="tags">
4309
4310
4311         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
4312
4313
4314       </div>
4315     </div>
4316     <div class="padding"></div>
4317
4318     <div class="entry">
4319       <div class="title">
4320         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Proof_reading_the_Norwegian_translation_of_Free_Culture_by_Lessig.html">Proof reading the Norwegian translation of Free Culture by Lessig</a>
4321       </div>
4322       <div class="date">
4323          4th April 2015
4324       </div>
4325       <div class="body">
4326         <p>During eastern I had some time to continue working on the Norwegian
4327 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
4328 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
4329 At the moment I am proof reading the finished text, looking for typos,
4330 inconsistent wordings and sentences that do not flow as they should.
4331 I'm more than two thirds done with the text, and welcome others to
4332 check the text up to chapter 13.  The current status is available on the
4333 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
4334 project pages.  You can also check out the
4335 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
4336 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
4337 and HTML version available in the
4338 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
4339 directory</a>.</p>
4340
4341 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
4342 you find any.</p>
4343
4344       </div>
4345       <div class="tags">
4346
4347
4348         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>.
4349
4350
4351       </div>
4352     </div>
4353     <div class="padding"></div>
4354
4355     <div class="entry">
4356       <div class="title">
4357         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html">Frikanalen, Norwegian TV channel for technical topics</a>
4358       </div>
4359       <div class="date">
4360          9th March 2015
4361       </div>
4362       <div class="body">
4363         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a>,
4364 where I am a member, and where people interested in free software,
4365 open standards and UNIX like operating systems like Linux and the BSDs
4366 come together, record our monthly technical presentations on video.
4367 The purpose is to document the talks and spread them to a wider
4368 audience.  For this, the the Norwegian nationwide open channel
4369 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is a useful venue.
4370 Since a few days ago, when I figured out the
4371 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/api/">REST API</a> to program the
4372 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/guide/">channel time schedule</a>,
4373 the channel has been filled with NUUG talks, related recordings and
4374 some Creative Commons licensed TED talks (from archive.org).  I fill
4375 all "leftover bits" on the channel with content from NUUG, which at
4376 the moment is almost 17 of 24 hours every day.</p>
4377
4378 <p>The list of NUUG videos
4379 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/organization/82">uploaded so far</a>
4380 include things like a
4381 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/625090">one hour talk by John
4382 Perry Barlow when he visited Oslo</a>, a presentation of
4383 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624275">Haiku, the BeOS
4384 re-implementation</a>, the
4385 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624493">history of FiksGataMi,
4386 the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet</a>, the good old
4387 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/623566">Warriors of the net
4388 video</A> and many others.</p>
4389
4390 <p>We have a large backlog of NUUG talks not yet uploaded to
4391 Frikanalen, and plan to upload every useful bit to the channel to
4392 spread the word there.  I also hope to find useful recordings from the
4393 Chaos Computer Club and Debian conferences and spread them on the
4394 channel as well.  But this require locating the videos and their meta
4395 information (title, description, license, etc), and preparing the
4396 recordings for broadcast, and I have not yet had the spare time to
4397 focus on this.  Perhaps you want to help.  Please join us on IRC,
4398 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
4399 if you want to help make this happen.</p>
4400
4401 <p>But as I said, already the channel is already almost exclusively
4402 filled with technical topics, and if you want to learn something new
4403 today, check out the <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">Ogg Theora
4404 web stream</a> or use one of the other ways to get access to the
4405 channel.  Unfortunately the Ogg Theora recoding for distribution still
4406 do not properly sync the video and sound.  It is generated by recoding
4407 a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to
4408 Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and we have not been able to find a way that
4409 produces acceptable quality.  Help needed, please get in touch if you
4410 know how to fix it using free software.</p>
4411
4412       </div>
4413       <div class="tags">
4414
4415
4416         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
4417
4418
4419       </div>
4420     </div>
4421     <div class="padding"></div>
4422
4423     <div class="entry">
4424       <div class="title">
4425         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Citizenfour_documentary_on_the_Snowden_confirmations_to_Norway.html">The Citizenfour documentary on the Snowden confirmations to Norway</a>
4426       </div>
4427       <div class="date">
4428         28th February 2015
4429       </div>
4430       <div class="body">
4431         <p>Today I was happy to learn that the documentary
4432 <a href="https://citizenfourfilm.com/">Citizenfour</a> by
4433 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras">Laura Poitras</a>
4434 finally will show up in Norway.  According to the magazine
4435 <a href="http://montages.no/">Montages</a>, a deal has finally been
4436 made for
4437 <a href="http://montages.no/nyheter/snowden-dokumentaren-citizenfour-far-norsk-kinodistribusjon/">Cinema
4438 distribution in Norway</a> and the movie will have its premiere soon.
4439 This is great news.  As part of my involvement with
4440 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User Group</a>, me and
4441 a friend have
4442 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_til_Norge_.shtml">tried
4443 to get the movie to Norway</a> ourselves, but obviously
4444 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_endelig_til_Norge_.shtml">we
4445 were too late</a> and Tor Fosse beat us to it.  I am happy he did, as
4446 the movie will make its way to the public and we do not have to make
4447 it happen ourselves.
4448 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM">The trailer</a>
4449 can be seen on youtube, if you are curious what kind of film this
4450 is.</p>
4451
4452 <p>The whistle blower Edward Snowden really deserve political asylum
4453 here in Norway, but I am afraid he would not be safe.</p>
4454
4455       </div>
4456       <div class="tags">
4457
4458
4459         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
4460
4461
4462       </div>
4463     </div>
4464     <div class="padding"></div>
4465
4466     <div class="entry">
4467       <div class="title">
4468         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Norwegian_open_channel_Frikanalen___24x7_on_the_Internet.html">The Norwegian open channel Frikanalen - 24x7 on the Internet</a>
4469       </div>
4470       <div class="date">
4471         25th February 2015
4472       </div>
4473       <div class="body">
4474         <p>The Norwegian nationwide open channel
4475 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is still going
4476 strong.  It allow everyone to send the video they want on national
4477 television.  It is a TV station administrated completely using a web
4478 browser, running only <ahref="https://github.com/Frikanalen">Free
4479 Software</a>, providing <ahref="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api">a REST
4480 api</a> for administrators and members, and with distribution on the
4481 national DVB-T distribution network RiksTV.  But only between 12:00
4482 and 17:30 Norwegian time.  This has finally changed, after many years
4483 with limited distribution.  A few weeks ago, we set up a Ogg Theora
4484 stream via icecast to allow everyone with Internet access to check out
4485 the channel the rest of the day.  This is presented on
4486 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">the Frikanalen web site now</a>.  And
4487 since a few days ago, the channel is also available
4488 via <a href="https://www.uninett.no/iptv-tilgang">multicast on
4489 UNINETT</a>, available for those using IPTV TVs and set-top boxes in
4490 the Norwegian National Research and Education network.</p>
4491
4492 <p>If you want to see what is on the channel, point your media player
4493 to one of these sources.  The first should work with most players and
4494 browsers, while as far as I know, the multicast UDP stream only work
4495 with VLC.</p>
4496
4497 <ul>
4498   <li><a href="http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv">http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv</a></li>
4499   <li>udp://@224.17.43.129:1234</li>
4500 </ul>
4501
4502 <p>The Ogg Theora / icecast stream is not working well, as the video
4503 and audio is slightly out of sync.  We have not been able to figure
4504 out how to fix it.  It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG
4505 transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora /
4506 Vorbis, and the result is less then stellar.  If you have ideas how to
4507 fix it, please let us know on frikanalen (at) nuug.no.  We currently
4508 use this with ffmpeg2theora 0.29:</p>
4509
4510 <blockquote><pre>
4511 ./ffmpeg2theora.linux &lt;OBE_gemini_URL.ts&gt; -F 25 -x 720 -y 405 \
4512  --deinterlace --inputfps 25 -c 1 -H 48000 --keyint 8 --buf-delay 100 \
4513  --nosync -V 700 -o - | oggfwd video.nuug.no 8000 &lt;pw&gt; /frikanalen.ogv
4514 </pre></blockquote>
4515
4516 <p>If you get the multicast UDP stream working, please let me know, as
4517 I am curious how far the multicast stream reach.  It do not make it to
4518 my home network, nor any other commercially available network in
4519 Norway that I am aware of.</p>
4520
4521       </div>
4522       <div class="tags">
4523
4524
4525         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
4526
4527
4528       </div>
4529     </div>
4530     <div class="padding"></div>
4531
4532     <div class="entry">
4533       <div class="title">
4534         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nude_body_scanner_now_present_on_Norwegian_airport.html">Nude body scanner now present on Norwegian airport</a>
4535       </div>
4536       <div class="date">
4537         10th February 2015
4538       </div>
4539       <div class="body">
4540         <p>Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, today report
4541 that
4542 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/reise/Slik-skannes-kroppen-din-i-fremtidens-sikkerhetskontroll-490666_1.snd">three
4543 of the nude body scanners now is put to use at Gardermoen</a>, the
4544 main airport in Norway.  This way the travelers can have their body
4545 photographed without cloths when visiting Norway.  Of course this
4546 horrible news is presented with a positive spin, stating that "now
4547 travelers can move past the security check point faster and more
4548 efficiently", but fail to mention that the machines in question take
4549 pictures of their nude bodies and store them internally in the
4550 computer, while only presenting sketch figure of the body to the
4551 public.  The article is written in a way that leave the impression
4552 that the new machines do not take these nude pictures and only create
4553 the sketch figures.  In reality the same nude pictures are still
4554 taken, but not presented to everyone.  They are still available for
4555 the owners of the system and the people doing maintenance of the
4556 scanners, as long as they are taken and stored.</p>
4557
4558 <p>Wikipedia have a more on
4559 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_body_scanner">Full body
4560 scanners</a>, including example images and a summary of the
4561 controversy about these scanners.</p>
4562
4563 <p>Personally I will decline to use these machines, as I believe strip
4564 searches of my body is a very intrusive attack on my privacy, and not
4565 something everyone should have to accept to travel.</p>
4566
4567       </div>
4568       <div class="tags">
4569
4570
4571         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>.
4572
4573
4574       </div>
4575     </div>
4576     <div class="padding"></div>
4577
4578     <div class="entry">
4579       <div class="title">
4580         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nagios_module_to_check_if_the_Frikanalen_video_stream_is_working.html">Nagios module to check if the Frikanalen video stream is working</a>
4581       </div>
4582       <div class="date">
4583          8th February 2015
4584       </div>
4585       <div class="body">
4586         <p>When running a TV station with both broadcast and web stream
4587 distribution, it is useful to know that the stream is working.  As I
4588 am involved in the Norwegian open channel
4589 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> as part of my
4590 activity in the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member
4591 organisation</a>, I wrote a script to use mplayer to connect to a
4592 video stream, pick two images 35 seconds apart and compare them.  If
4593 the images are missing or identical, something is probably wrong with
4594 the stream and an alarm should be triggered.  The script is written as
4595 a Nagios plugin, allowing us to use Nagios to run the check regularly
4596 and sound the alarm when something is wrong.  It is able to detect
4597 both a hanging and a broken video stream.</p>
4598
4599 <p>I just uploaded the code for the script into the
4600 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen/frikanalen/blob/master/nagios-plugin/check_video_stream_images">Frikanalen
4601 git repository</a> on github.  If you run a TV station with web
4602 streaming, perhaps you can find it useful too.</p>
4603
4604 <p>Last year, the Frikanalen public TV station transformed into using
4605 only Linux based free software to administrate, schedule and
4606 distribute the TV content.  The
4607 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen">source code for the entire TV
4608 station</a> is available from the Github project page.  Everyone can
4609 use it to send their content on national TV, and we provide both a web
4610 GUI and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api/">a web API</a> to
4611 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/login/?next=/members/video/">add</a>
4612 and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/members/plan/">schedule
4613 content</a>.  And thanks to last weeks developer gathering and
4614 following activity, we now have the schedule
4615 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/xmltv/2015/01/01">available as
4616 XMLTV</a> too.  Still a lot of work left to do, especially with the
4617 process to add videos and with the scheduling, so your contribution is
4618 most welcome.  Perhaps you want to set up your own TV station?</p>
4619
4620 <p>Update 2015-02-25: Got a tip from Uninett about their
4621 <a href="https://scm.uninett.no/maalepaaler/qstream/">qstream
4622 monitoring system</a>, which gather connection time, jitter, packet
4623 loss and burst bandwidth usage.  It look useful to check if UDP
4624 streams are working as they should.</p>
4625
4626       </div>
4627       <div class="tags">
4628
4629
4630         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>.
4631
4632
4633       </div>
4634     </div>
4635     <div class="padding"></div>
4636
4637     <div class="entry">
4638       <div class="title">
4639         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_subtitles_for_the_FSF_video_User_Liberation.html">Norwegian Bokmål subtitles for the FSF video User Liberation</a>
4640       </div>
4641       <div class="date">
4642         12th January 2015
4643       </div>
4644       <div class="body">
4645         <p>A few days ago, the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/">Free Software
4646 Foundation</a> announced a new video
4647 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">explaining
4648 Free software</a> in simple terms.  The video named User Liberation is
4649 3 minutes long, and I recommend showing it to everyone you know as a
4650 way to explain what Free Software is all about.  Unfortunately several
4651 of the people I know do not understand English and Spanish, so it did
4652 not make sense to show it to them.</p>
4653
4654 <p>But today I was told that
4655 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">English
4656 subtitles were available</a> and set out to provide Norwegian Bokmål
4657 subtitles based on these.  The result has been sent to FSF and made
4658 available in
4659 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/fsf-video-user-liberation-subtitles">a
4660 git repository</a> provided by Github.  Please let me know if you find
4661 errors or have improvements to the subtitles.</p>
4662
4663 <p>Update 2015-02-03: Since I publised this post, FSF created a
4664 Libreplanet
4665 <a href="http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:FSF/User_Liberation_Video_Translation">project
4666 to track subtitles</A> for the video.</p>
4667
4668       </div>
4669       <div class="tags">
4670
4671
4672         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
4673
4674
4675       </div>
4676     </div>
4677     <div class="padding"></div>
4678
4679     <div class="entry">
4680       <div class="title">
4681         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_version_of_the_Norwegian_web_service_FiksGataMi.html">Updated version of the Norwegian web service FiksGataMi</a>
4682       </div>
4683       <div class="date">
4684         30th December 2014
4685       </div>
4686       <div class="body">
4687         <p>I am very happy that we in the
4688 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group (NUUG)</a>,
4689 spearheaded by Marius Halden from NUUG and Matthew Somerville from
4690 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>, finally managed to
4691 upgrade the code base for the Norwegian version of
4692 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org/">FixMyStreet</a>.  This
4693 was the first major update since 2011. The refurbished
4694 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is already live, and
4695 seem to hold up the pressure.  The
4696 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__FiksGataMi_i_oppdatert_og_mobilvennlig_klesdrakt.shtml">press
4697 release and announcement</a> went out this morning.</p>
4698
4699 <p>FixMyStreet is a web platform for allowing the citizens to easily
4700 report problems with public infrastructure to the responsible
4701 authorities.  Think of it as a shared mail client with map support,
4702 allowing everyone to see what already was reported and comment on the
4703 reports in public.</p>
4704
4705       </div>
4706       <div class="tags">
4707
4708
4709         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>.
4710
4711
4712       </div>
4713     </div>
4714     <div class="padding"></div>
4715
4716     <div class="entry">
4717       <div class="title">
4718         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Of_course_USA_loses_in_cyber_war___NSA_and_friends_made_sure_it_would_happen.html">Of course USA loses in cyber war - NSA and friends made sure it would happen</a>
4719       </div>
4720       <div class="date">
4721         19th December 2014
4722       </div>
4723       <div class="body">
4724         <p>So, Sony caved in
4725 (<a href="https://twitter.com/RobLowe/status/545338568512917504">according
4726 to Rob Lowe</a>) and demonstrated that America lost its first cyberwar
4727 (<a href="https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/545339074975109122">according
4728 to Newt Gingrich</a>).  It should not surprise anyone, after the
4729 whistle blower Edward Snowden documented that the government of USA
4730 and their allies for many years have done their best to make sure the
4731 technology used by its citizens is filled with security holes allowing
4732 the secret services to spy on its own population.  No one in their
4733 right minds could believe that the ability to snoop on the people all
4734 over the globe could only be used by the personnel authorized to do so
4735 by the president of the United States of America.  If the capabilities
4736 are there, they will be used by friend and foe alike, and now they are
4737 being used to bring Sony on its knees.</p>
4738
4739 <p>I doubt it will a lesson learned, and expect USA to lose its next
4740 cyber war too, given how eager the western intelligence communities
4741 (and probably the non-western too, but it is less in the news) seem to
4742 be to continue its current dragnet surveillance practice.</p>
4743
4744 <p>There is a reason why China and others are trying to move away from
4745 Windows to Linux and other alternatives, and it is not to avoid
4746 sending its hard earned dollars to Cayman Islands (or whatever
4747 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven">tax haven</a>
4748 Microsoft is using these days to collect the majority of its
4749 income. :)</p>
4750
4751       </div>
4752       <div class="tags">
4753
4754
4755         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
4756
4757
4758       </div>
4759     </div>
4760     <div class="padding"></div>
4761
4762     <div class="entry">
4763       <div class="title">
4764         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_stay_with_sysvinit_in_Debian_Jessie.html">How to stay with sysvinit in Debian Jessie</a>
4765       </div>
4766       <div class="date">
4767         22nd November 2014
4768       </div>
4769       <div class="body">
4770         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
4771 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
4772 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
4773 courtesy of
4774 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
4775 Schubert</a> and
4776 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
4777 McVittie</a>.
4778
4779 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
4780 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
4781 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
4782 you upgrade:</p>
4783
4784 <p><blockquote><pre>
4785 Package: systemd-sysv
4786 Pin: release o=Debian
4787 Pin-Priority: -1
4788 </pre></blockquote><p>
4789
4790 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
4791 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
4792 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
4793 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
4794 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
4795
4796 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
4797 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
4798 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
4799 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
4800 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
4801 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
4802
4803 <p><blockquote><pre>
4804 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
4805 </pre></blockquote><p>
4806
4807 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
4808
4809 <p><blockquote><pre>
4810 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
4811 </pre></blockquote><p>
4812
4813 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
4814 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
4815
4816 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
4817 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
4818 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
4819 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
4820 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
4821 Jessie is released.</p>
4822
4823 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
4824 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
4825 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
4826 line.</p>
4827
4828       </div>
4829       <div class="tags">
4830
4831
4832         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>.
4833
4834
4835       </div>
4836     </div>
4837     <div class="padding"></div>
4838
4839     <div class="entry">
4840       <div class="title">
4841         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Debian_package_for_SMTP_via_Tor__aka_SMTorP__using_exim4.html">A Debian package for SMTP via Tor (aka SMTorP) using exim4</a>
4842       </div>
4843       <div class="date">
4844         10th November 2014
4845       </div>
4846       <div class="body">
4847         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
4848 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
4849 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
4850
4851 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
4852 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
4853 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
4854 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
4855 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
4856 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
4857 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
4858 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
4859 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
4860 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
4861 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
4862 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
4863 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
4864 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
4865 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
4866
4867 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
4868 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
4869 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
4870 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
4871 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
4872 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
4873 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
4874 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
4875 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
4876 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
4877 were fairly easy, and
4878 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
4879 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
4880 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
4881 useful approach.</p>
4882
4883 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
4884 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
4885 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
4886 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
4887 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
4888 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
4889 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
4890 this:</p>
4891
4892 <p><blockquote><pre>
4893 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
4894   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
4895 </pre></blockquote></p>
4896
4897 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
4898 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
4899
4900 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
4901 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
4902 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
4903 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
4904 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
4905 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
4906 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
4907 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
4908 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
4909 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
4910 system.</p>
4911
4912 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
4913 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
4914 SMTorP. :)</p>
4915
4916       </div>
4917       <div class="tags">
4918
4919
4920         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
4921
4922
4923       </div>
4924     </div>
4925     <div class="padding"></div>
4926
4927     <div class="entry">
4928       <div class="title">
4929         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu released (alpha0)</a>
4930       </div>
4931       <div class="date">
4932         27th October 2014
4933       </div>
4934       <div class="body">
4935         <p>I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just
4936 sent out
4937 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2014/10/msg00000.html">this
4938 announcement</a>:</p>
4939
4940 <pre>
4941 The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
4942 Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0
4943
4944 Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
4945 various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
4946 and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
4947 Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
4948 roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
4949 hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
4950 pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
4951
4952 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
4953 installation instructions are available, including detailed
4954 instructions in the manual[1] explaining the first steps, such as
4955 setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
4956 for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
4957 of at least 5 characters!
4958
4959  [1] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie</a> &gt;
4960
4961 Would you like to give your school's computer a longer life? Are you
4962 tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
4963 reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
4964 the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
4965 Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
4966
4967 Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
4968 mostly in Germany and Norway.
4969
4970 About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
4971 ===============================
4972
4973 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[2], is a Linux distribution based
4974 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
4975 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
4976 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
4977 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
4978 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
4979 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
4980 machines can be installed via the network.  The provided school server
4981 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
4982 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
4983 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
4984 packages[3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
4985 schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
4986 environment.
4987
4988  [2] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">http://www.skolelinux.org/</a> &gt;
4989  [3] &lt;URL: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html</a> &gt;
4990
4991 Full release notes and manual
4992 =============================
4993
4994 Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
4995 and bugfixes of Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
4996 list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[4] for
4997 the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
4998 available, see the manual translation overview[5].
4999
5000  [4] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features</a> &gt;
5001  [5] &lt;URL: <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/</a> &gt;
5002
5003 Where to get it
5004 ---------------
5005
5006 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (624 MiB) you can use
5007
5008  * <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso</a>
5009  * <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso</a>
5010  * rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
5011
5012 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
5013
5014 New features for Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released 2014-10-27
5015 ===============================================================================
5016
5017
5018 Installation changes
5019 --------------------
5020
5021  * PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
5022
5023 Software updates
5024 ----------------
5025
5026 Everything which is new in Debian Jessie 8.0, eg:
5027
5028  * Linux kernel 3.16.x
5029  * Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.11.12, GNOME 3.14, Xfce 4.10,
5030    LXDE 0.5.6 and MATE 1.8 (KDE "Plasma" is installed by default; to
5031    choose one of the others see manual.)
5032  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 38
5033  * !LibreOffice 4.3.3
5034  * GOsa 2.7.4
5035  * LTSP 5.5.4
5036  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
5037  * new boot framework: systemd
5038  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.07
5039  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
5040  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
5041  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.0
5042  * golearn 0.9
5043  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
5044  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
5045  * Debian Jessie includes about 42000 packages available for
5046    installation.
5047  * More information about Debian Jessie 8.0 is provided in the release
5048    notes[6] and the installation manual[7].
5049
5050  [6] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes</a> &gt;
5051  [7] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual</a> &gt;
5052
5053 Fixed bugs
5054 ----------
5055
5056  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
5057    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
5058    information is corrected (Debian bug #710362)
5059  * and many others.
5060
5061 Documentation and translation updates
5062 -------------------------------------
5063
5064  * The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
5065    Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
5066    Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
5067
5068 Other changes
5069 -------------
5070
5071  * Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
5072    server takes more time.
5073  * To manage printers localhost:631 has to be used, currently www:631
5074    doesn't work.
5075
5076 Regressions / known problems
5077 ----------------------------
5078
5079  * Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
5080    exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #765694
5081    and Debian bug #762103).
5082  * Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
5083    #764594).  The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
5084  * PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
5085    work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
5086    Will be fixed when Debian bug #766960 is fixed in Jessie.
5087
5088 See the status page[8] for the complete list.
5089
5090  [8] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie</a> &gt;
5091
5092 How to report bugs
5093 ------------------
5094
5095 &lt;URL: <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a> &gt;
5096
5097 About Debian
5098 ============
5099
5100 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
5101 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
5102 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
5103 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
5104 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
5105 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
5106 operating system.
5107
5108 Contact Information
5109 For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[9] or send
5110 mail to press@debian.org.
5111
5112  [9] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a> &gt;
5113 </pre>
5114
5115       </div>
5116       <div class="tags">
5117
5118
5119         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>.
5120
5121
5122       </div>
5123     </div>
5124     <div class="padding"></div>
5125
5126     <div class="entry">
5127       <div class="title">
5128         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html">I spent last weekend recording MakerCon Nordic</a>
5129       </div>
5130       <div class="date">
5131         23rd October 2014
5132       </div>
5133       <div class="body">
5134         <p>I spent last weekend at <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">Makercon
5135 Nordic</a>, a great conference and workshop for makers in Norway and
5136 the surrounding countries.  I had volunteered on behalf of the
5137 Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG) to video record the talks, and we
5138 had a great and exhausting time recording the entire day, two days in
5139 a row.  There were only two of us, Hans-Petter and me, and we used the
5140 regular video equipment for NUUG, with a
5141 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">dvswitch</a>, a
5142 camera and a VGA to DV convert box, and mixed video and slides
5143 live.</p>
5144
5145 <p>Hans-Petter did the post-processing, consisting of uploading the
5146 around 180 GiB of raw video to Youtube, and the result is
5147 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">now becoming
5148 public</a> on the MakerConNordic account.  The videos have the license
5149 NUUG always use on our recordings, which is
5150 <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/no/">Creative
5151 Commons Navngivelse-Del på samme vilkår 3.0 Norge</a>.  Many great
5152 talks available.  Check it out! :)</p>
5153
5154       </div>
5155       <div class="tags">
5156
5157
5158         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>.
5159
5160
5161       </div>
5162     </div>
5163     <div class="padding"></div>
5164
5165     <div class="entry">
5166       <div class="title">
5167         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/listadmin__the_quick_way_to_moderate_mailman_lists___nice_free_software.html">listadmin, the quick way to moderate mailman lists - nice free software</a>
5168       </div>
5169       <div class="date">
5170         22nd October 2014
5171       </div>
5172       <div class="body">
5173         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
5174 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
5175 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
5176 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
5177 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
5178 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
5179 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
5180 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
5181 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
5182 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
5183 lists I recently took over:</p>
5184
5185 <p><blockquote><pre>
5186 % time listadmin xiph
5187 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
5188 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
5189
5190 real    0m1.709s
5191 user    0m0.232s
5192 sys     0m0.012s
5193 %
5194 </pre></blockquote></p>
5195
5196 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
5197 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
5198 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
5199 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
5200 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
5201 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
5202 program.</p>
5203
5204 <p>If you install
5205 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
5206 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
5207 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
5208
5209 <p><blockquote><pre>
5210 username username@example.org
5211 spamlevel 23
5212 default discard
5213 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
5214
5215 password secret
5216 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
5217 mailman-list@lists.example.com
5218
5219 password hidden
5220 other-list@otherserver.example.org
5221 </pre></blockquote></p>
5222
5223 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
5224 learn the details.</p>
5225
5226 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
5227 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
5228 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
5229 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
5230
5231 <p><blockquote><pre>
5232 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
5233 </pre></blockquote></p>
5234
5235 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
5236 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
5237 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
5238 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
5239 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
5240 email.</p>
5241
5242 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
5243 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
5244 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
5245 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
5246 software.</p>
5247
5248 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5249 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5250 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5251
5252 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
5253 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
5254 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
5255 sure why.</p>
5256
5257       </div>
5258       <div class="tags">
5259
5260
5261         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
5262
5263
5264       </div>
5265     </div>
5266     <div class="padding"></div>
5267
5268     <div class="entry">
5269       <div class="title">
5270         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
5271       </div>
5272       <div class="date">
5273         17th October 2014
5274       </div>
5275       <div class="body">
5276         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
5277 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
5278 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
5279 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
5280 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
5281 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
5282 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
5283
5284 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
5285 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
5286 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
5287 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
5288 of this story.)</p>
5289
5290 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
5291 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
5292 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
5293 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
5294 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
5295 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
5296 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
5297 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
5298 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
5299 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
5300
5301 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
5302 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
5303 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
5304 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
5305
5306 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
5307 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
5308
5309 <p><blockquote><pre>
5310 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
5311 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
5312 </pre></blockquote></p>
5313
5314 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
5315 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
5316 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
5317 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
5318 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
5319 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
5320 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
5321 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
5322
5323 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
5324 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
5325
5326 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
5327 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
5328 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
5329 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
5330 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
5331
5332 <p><blockquote><pre>
5333 Task: isenkram-packages
5334 Section: hardware
5335 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
5336  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
5337  proposed.
5338 Test-new-install: show show
5339 Relevance: 8
5340 Packages: for-current-hardware
5341
5342 Task: isenkram-firmware
5343 Section: hardware
5344 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
5345  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
5346  packages are proposed.
5347 Test-new-install: mark show
5348 Relevance: 8
5349 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
5350 </pre></blockquote></p>
5351
5352 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
5353 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
5354 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
5355 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
5356 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
5357
5358 <p><blockquote><pre>
5359 #!/bin/sh
5360 #
5361 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
5362 export PATH
5363 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
5364 </pre></blockquote></p>
5365
5366 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
5367 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
5368
5369 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
5370 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
5371 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
5372 install.</p>
5373
5374 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
5375 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
5376 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
5377
5378       </div>
5379       <div class="tags">
5380
5381
5382         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
5383
5384
5385       </div>
5386     </div>
5387     <div class="padding"></div>
5388
5389     <div class="entry">
5390       <div class="title">
5391         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ubuntu_used_to_show_the_bread_prizes_at_ICA_Storo.html">Ubuntu used to show the bread prizes at ICA Storo</a>
5392       </div>
5393       <div class="date">
5394          4th October 2014
5395       </div>
5396       <div class="body">
5397         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
5398 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
5399 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
5400 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
5401
5402 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
5403
5404 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
5405 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
5406 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
5407
5408       </div>
5409       <div class="tags">
5410
5411
5412         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>.
5413
5414
5415       </div>
5416     </div>
5417     <div class="padding"></div>
5418
5419     <div class="entry">
5420       <div class="title">
5421         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_version_0_17_is_ready.html">New lsdvd release version 0.17 is ready</a>
5422       </div>
5423       <div class="date">
5424          4th October 2014
5425       </div>
5426       <div class="body">
5427         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
5428 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
5429 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
5430 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
5431 Dibb.</p>
5432
5433 <p>I just wrapped up
5434 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
5435 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
5436 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
5437 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
5438 0.17.</p>
5439
5440 <ul>
5441
5442  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
5443  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
5444    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
5445  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
5446  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
5447  <li>Fix include orders</li>
5448  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
5449  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
5450  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
5451    the palette size is the same.</li>
5452  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
5453  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
5454  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
5455  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
5456    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
5457
5458 </ul>
5459
5460 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
5461 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
5462 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
5463
5464       </div>
5465       <div class="tags">
5466
5467
5468         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
5469
5470
5471       </div>
5472     </div>
5473     <div class="padding"></div>
5474
5475     <div class="entry">
5476       <div class="title">
5477         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_Debian_Edu_Jessie_despite_some_fatal_problems_with_the_installer.html">How to test Debian Edu Jessie despite some fatal problems with the installer</a>
5478       </div>
5479       <div class="date">
5480         26th September 2014
5481       </div>
5482       <div class="body">
5483         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
5484 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
5485 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
5486 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
5487 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
5488 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
5489 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
5490 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
5491 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
5492 future.  The
5493 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
5494 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
5495 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
5496 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
5497 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
5498
5499 <p>First, download the test ISO via
5500 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
5501 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
5502 or rsync (use
5503 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
5504 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
5505 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
5506 install with some tweaking.</p>
5507
5508 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
5509 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
5510
5511 <p><blockquote><pre>
5512 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
5513 </pre></blockquote></p>
5514
5515 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
5516 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
5517 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
5518 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
5519
5520 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
5521 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
5522 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
5523 your need.</p>
5524
5525 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
5526 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
5527 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
5528 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
5529 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
5530 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
5531 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
5532 days.</p>
5533
5534 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
5535 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
5536 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
5537 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
5538 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
5539 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
5540 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
5541 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
5542 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
5543
5544 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
5545 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
5546 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
5547
5548       </div>
5549       <div class="tags">
5550
5551
5552         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>.
5553
5554
5555       </div>
5556     </div>
5557     <div class="padding"></div>
5558
5559     <div class="entry">
5560       <div class="title">
5561         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Suddenly_I_am_the_new_upstream_of_the_lsdvd_command_line_tool.html">Suddenly I am the new upstream of the lsdvd command line tool</a>
5562       </div>
5563       <div class="date">
5564         25th September 2014
5565       </div>
5566       <div class="body">
5567         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
5568 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
5569 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
5570 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
5571 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
5572 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
5573 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
5574 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
5575 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
5576 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
5577 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
5578 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
5579 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
5580
5581 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
5582 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
5583 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
5584 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
5585 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
5586 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
5587 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
5588 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
5589 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
5590 list</a>. :)</p>
5591
5592       </div>
5593       <div class="tags">
5594
5595
5596         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
5597
5598
5599       </div>
5600     </div>
5601     <div class="padding"></div>
5602
5603     <div class="entry">
5604       <div class="title">
5605         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">Speeding up the Debian installer using eatmydata and dpkg-divert</a>
5606       </div>
5607       <div class="date">
5608         16th September 2014
5609       </div>
5610       <div class="body">
5611         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
5612 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
5613 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
5614 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
5615 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
5616 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
5617 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
5618 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
5619 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
5620 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
5621 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
5622 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
5623 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
5624 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
5625
5626 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
5627 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
5628 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
5629 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
5630 depend on the small and clever package
5631 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
5632 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
5633 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
5634 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
5635 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
5636 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
5637 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
5638 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
5639 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
5640 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
5641 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
5642
5643 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
5644 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
5645 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
5646 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
5647 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
5648 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
5649 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
5650 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
5651 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
5652 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
5653 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
5654 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
5655 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
5656 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
5657 dialog.</p>
5658
5659 <p><table>
5660
5661 <tr>
5662 <th>Machine/setup</th>
5663 <th>Original tasksel</th>
5664 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
5665 <th>Reduction</th>
5666 </tr>
5667
5668 <tr>
5669 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
5670 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
5671 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
5672 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
5673 </tr>
5674
5675 <tr>
5676 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
5677 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
5678 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
5679 <td>23 min 40%</td>
5680 </tr>
5681
5682 <tr>
5683 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
5684 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
5685 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
5686 <td>11 min 50%</td>
5687 </tr>
5688
5689 <tr>
5690 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
5691 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
5692 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
5693 <td>2 min 33%</td>
5694 </tr>
5695
5696 <tr>
5697 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
5698 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
5699 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
5700 <td>4 min 21%</td>
5701 </tr>
5702
5703 </table></p>
5704
5705 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
5706 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
5707 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
5708 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
5709 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
5710 installed.</p>
5711
5712 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
5713 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
5714 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
5715 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
5716 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
5717 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
5718 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
5719 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
5720 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
5721 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
5722 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
5723 for the entire installation.</p>
5724
5725 <p>I've implemented this in the
5726 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
5727 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
5728 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
5729 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
5730 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
5731
5732 <p><blockquote><pre>
5733 #!/bin/sh
5734 set -e
5735 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
5736 info() {
5737     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
5738 }
5739 error() {
5740     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
5741 }
5742 override_install() {
5743     apt-install eatmydata || true
5744     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
5745         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
5746             file=/usr/bin/$bin
5747             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
5748             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
5749                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
5750                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
5751                     > /target$file.edu
5752                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
5753                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
5754                     --rename --quiet --add $file
5755                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
5756             else
5757                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
5758             fi
5759         done
5760     else
5761         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
5762     fi
5763 }
5764
5765 override_install
5766 </pre></blockquote></p>
5767
5768 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
5769 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
5770
5771 <p><blockquote><pre>
5772 #! /bin/sh -e
5773 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
5774 error() {
5775     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
5776 }
5777 remove_install_override() {
5778     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
5779         file=/usr/bin/$bin
5780         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
5781             rm /target$file
5782             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
5783                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
5784             rm /target$file.edu
5785         else
5786             error "Missing divert for $file."
5787         fi
5788     done
5789     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
5790 }
5791
5792 remove_install_override
5793 </pre></blockquote></p>
5794
5795 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
5796 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
5797 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
5798
5799 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
5800 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
5801 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
5802 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
5803 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
5804 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
5805 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
5806 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
5807 everyone.</p>
5808
5809 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
5810 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
5811 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
5812 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
5813
5814 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
5815 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
5816 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
5817 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
5818 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
5819
5820 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
5821 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
5822 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
5823 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
5824 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
5825
5826       </div>
5827       <div class="tags">
5828
5829
5830         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>.
5831
5832
5833       </div>
5834     </div>
5835     <div class="padding"></div>
5836
5837     <div class="entry">
5838       <div class="title">
5839         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_bye_subkeys_pgp_net__welcome_pool_sks_keyservers_net.html">Good bye subkeys.pgp.net, welcome pool.sks-keyservers.net</a>
5840       </div>
5841       <div class="date">
5842         10th September 2014
5843       </div>
5844       <div class="body">
5845         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
5846 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
5847 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
5848 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
5849 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
5850 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
5851 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
5852 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
5853 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
5854 those problems are gone now.</p>
5855
5856 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
5857 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
5858 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
5859 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
5860 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
5861
5862 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
5863 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
5864 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
5865
5866 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
5867 line:</p>
5868
5869 <p><blockquote><pre>
5870 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
5871 </pre></blockquote></p>
5872
5873 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
5874 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
5875 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
5876 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
5877
5878 <p><blockquote><pre>
5879 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
5880 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
5881 %
5882 </pre></blockquote></p>
5883
5884 <p>Now if only
5885 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
5886 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
5887 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
5888 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
5889 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
5890 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
5891 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
5892 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
5893 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
5894
5895       </div>
5896       <div class="tags">
5897
5898
5899         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
5900
5901
5902       </div>
5903     </div>
5904     <div class="padding"></div>
5905
5906     <div class="entry">
5907       <div class="title">
5908         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Do_you_need_an_agreement_with_MPEG_LA_to_publish_and_broadcast_H_264_video_in_Norway_.html">Do you need an agreement with MPEG-LA to publish and broadcast H.264 video in Norway?</a>
5909       </div>
5910       <div class="date">
5911         25th August 2014
5912       </div>
5913       <div class="body">
5914         <p>Two years later, I am still not sure if it is legal here in Norway
5915 to use or publish a video in H.264 or MPEG4 format edited by the
5916 commercially licensed video editors, without limiting the use to
5917 create "personal" or "non-commercial" videos or get a license
5918 agreement with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com">MPEG LA</a>.  If one
5919 want to publish and broadcast video in a non-personal or commercial
5920 setting, it might be that those tools can not be used, or that video
5921 format can not be used, without breaking their copyright license.  I
5922 am not sure.
5923 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Trenger_en_avtale_med_MPEG_LA_for___publisere_og_kringkaste_H_264_video_.html">Back
5924 then</a>, I found that the copyright license terms for Adobe Premiere
5925 and Apple Final Cut Pro both specified that one could not use the
5926 program to produce anything else without a patent license from MPEG
5927 LA.  The issue is not limited to those two products, though.  Other
5928 much used products like those from Avid and Sorenson Media have terms
5929 of use are similar to those from Adobe and Apple.  The complicating
5930 factor making me unsure if those terms have effect in Norway or not is
5931 that the patents in question are not valid in Norway, but copyright
5932 licenses are.</p>
5933
5934 <p>These are the terms for Avid Artist Suite, according to their
5935 <a href="http://www.avid.com/US/about-avid/legal-notices/legal-enduserlicense2">published
5936 end user</a>
5937 <a href="http://www.avid.com/static/resources/common/documents/corporate/LICENSE.pdf">license
5938 text</a> (converted to lower case text for easier reading):</p>
5939
5940 <p><blockquote>
5941 <p>18.2. MPEG-4. MPEG-4 technology may be included with the
5942 software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice: </p>
5943
5944 <p>This product is licensed under the MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio
5945 license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i)
5946 encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4
5947 video”) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a
5948 consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was
5949 obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4
5950 video.  No license is granted or shall be implied for any other
5951 use. Additional information including that relating to promotional,
5952 internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG
5953 LA, LLC.  See http://www.mpegla.com. This product is licensed under
5954 the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license for encoding in compliance
5955 with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except that an additional license
5956 and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with
5957 (i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a
5958 title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by
5959 title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage
5960 and/or use, such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA,
5961 LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.</p>
5962
5963 <p>18.3. H.264/AVC. H.264/AVC technology may be included with the
5964 software.  MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:</p>
5965
5966 <p>This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
5967 the personal use of a consumer or other uses in which it does not
5968 receive remuneration to (i) encode video in compliance with the AVC
5969 standard (“AVC video”) and/or (ii) decode AVC video that was encoded
5970 by a consumer engaged in a personal activity and/or was obtained from
5971 a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted
5972 or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information may be
5973 obtained from MPEG LA, L.L.C. See http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
5974 </blockquote></p>
5975
5976 <p>Note the requirement that the videos created can only be used for
5977 personal or non-commercial purposes.</p>
5978
5979 <p>The Sorenson Media software have
5980 <a href="http://www.sorensonmedia.com/terms/">similar terms</a>:</p>
5981
5982 <p><blockquote>
5983
5984 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4 Video
5985 Decoders and/or Encoders: Any such product is licensed under the
5986 MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio license for the personal and
5987 non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance
5988 with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4 video”) and/or (ii) decoding
5989 MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and
5990 non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider
5991 licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4 video. No license is granted or
5992 shall be implied for any other use. Additional information including
5993 that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and
5994 licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See
5995 http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
5996
5997 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4
5998 Consumer Recorded Data Encoder, MPEG-4 Systems Internet Data Encoder,
5999 MPEG-4 Mobile Data Encoder, and/or MPEG-4 Unique Use Encoder: Any such
6000 product is licensed under the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license
6001 for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except
6002 that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for
6003 encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical
6004 media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data
6005 which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an
6006 end user for permanent storage and/or use. Such additional license may
6007 be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for
6008 additional details.</p>
6009
6010 </blockquote></p>
6011
6012 <p>Some free software like
6013 <a href="https://handbrake.fr/">Handbrake</A> and
6014 <a href="http://ffmpeg.org/">FFMPEG</a> uses GPL/LGPL licenses and do
6015 not have any such terms included, so for those, there is no
6016 requirement to limit the use to personal and non-commercial.</p>
6017
6018       </div>
6019       <div class="tags">
6020
6021
6022         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
6023
6024
6025       </div>
6026     </div>
6027     <div class="padding"></div>
6028
6029     <div class="entry">
6030       <div class="title">
6031         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html">Debian Edu interview: Bernd Zeitzen</a>
6032       </div>
6033       <div class="date">
6034         31st July 2014
6035       </div>
6036       <div class="body">
6037         <p>The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
6038 schools, <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
6039 Skolelinux</a>, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
6040 involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
6041 from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
6042 the setup.  I managed to interview him this summer.</p>
6043
6044 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
6045
6046 <p>My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self
6047 employed physiotherapist.  My former profession is tool maker, but I
6048 haven't worked for 30 years in this job.  30 years ago I started to
6049 support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
6050 administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
6051 Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
6052 Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
6053 works with Windows . :-(</p>
6054
6055 <p>In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
6056 Windows 98, 2000, XP, …, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX.  Today we are running a
6057 Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
6058 children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
6059 psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
6060 work with the documentations of our patients.</p>
6061
6062 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
6063 project?</strong></p>
6064
6065 <p>Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
6066 his school (<a href="http://www.gymnasium-harsewinkel.de/">Gymnasium
6067 Harsewinkel</a>).  They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
6068 were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
6069 software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
6070 computer skills in optional lessons.  I'm spending 4-6 hours a week
6071 with this job.</p>
6072
6073 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6074 Edu?</strong></p>
6075
6076 <p>The independence.</p>
6077
6078 <p>First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
6079 software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
6080 included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.</p>
6081
6082 <p>Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
6083 possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices.  The
6084 servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
6085 working reliable. </p>
6086
6087 <p>We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
6088 workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
6089 solution for all classrooms.  These machines are all booting from the
6090 terminal server.  In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
6091 workstations.  Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
6092 machines in their classrooms.  Internet access is realized by a WLAN
6093 router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
6094 dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.</p>
6095
6096 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6097 Edu?</strong></p>
6098
6099 <p>Teachers and pupils are Windows users.  &lt;Irony on&gt; And Linux
6100 isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. &lt;Irony
6101 off&gt; They don't realize the stability of the system. </p>
6102
6103 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
6104
6105 <p>Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba,
6106 Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, … and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)</p>
6107
6108 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
6109 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
6110
6111 <p>In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
6112 which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
6113 teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
6114 Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
6115 Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software
6116 instead.  Another problem are the publisher of school books.  They
6117 develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.</p>
6118
6119       </div>
6120       <div class="tags">
6121
6122
6123         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>.
6124
6125
6126       </div>
6127     </div>
6128     <div class="padding"></div>
6129
6130     <div class="entry">
6131       <div class="title">
6132         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/98_6_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html">98.6 percent done with the Norwegian draft translation of Free Culture</a>
6133       </div>
6134       <div class="date">
6135         23rd July 2014
6136       </div>
6137       <div class="body">
6138         <p>This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian
6139 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
6140 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
6141 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright
6142 law.  Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text.  There
6143 are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page
6144 need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be
6145 translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof
6146 reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations
6147 need to be cleaned up.  The work stopped up because I had to give
6148 priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of
6149 the translation show this very well:</p>
6150
6151 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
6152
6153 <p>If you want to read the result, check out the
6154 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
6155 project pages and the
6156 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
6157 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
6158 and HTML version available in the
6159 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
6160 directory</a>.</p>
6161
6162 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
6163 you find any.</p>
6164
6165       </div>
6166       <div class="tags">
6167
6168
6169         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>.
6170
6171
6172       </div>
6173     </div>
6174     <div class="padding"></div>
6175
6176     <div class="entry">
6177       <div class="title">
6178         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html">From English wiki to translated PDF and epub via Docbook</a>
6179       </div>
6180       <div class="date">
6181         17th June 2014
6182       </div>
6183       <div class="body">
6184         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
6185 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
6186 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
6187 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
6188 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
6189
6190 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
6191 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
6192 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
6193 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
6194 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
6195 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
6196 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
6197 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
6198 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
6199 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
6200 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
6201 goals.</p>
6202
6203 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
6204 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
6205 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
6206 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
6207 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
6208 chapters together into one large web page (aka
6209 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
6210 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
6211 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
6212 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
6213 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
6214 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
6215 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
6216 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
6217 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
6218 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
6219 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
6220 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
6221 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
6222 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
6223 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
6224 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
6225 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
6226 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
6227
6228 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
6229 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
6230 track the English original.  For this we use the
6231 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
6232 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
6233 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
6234 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
6235 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
6236 files), which the translations update with the native language
6237 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
6238 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
6239 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
6240 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
6241 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
6242 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
6243 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
6244 of the documentation.</p>
6245
6246 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
6247 recommend using
6248 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
6249 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
6250 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
6251 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
6252 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
6253 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
6254 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
6255 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
6256
6257 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
6258 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
6259 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
6260 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
6261 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
6262 translated images by storing translated versions in
6263 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
6264 package maintainers know more.</p>
6265
6266 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
6267 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
6268 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
6269 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
6270 PDF version</a> or the
6271 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
6272 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
6273 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
6274
6275 <p>To learn more, check out
6276 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
6277 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
6278 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
6279 manual on the wiki</a> and
6280 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
6281 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
6282
6283       </div>
6284       <div class="tags">
6285
6286
6287         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6288
6289
6290       </div>
6291     </div>
6292     <div class="padding"></div>
6293
6294     <div class="entry">
6295       <div class="title">
6296         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html">Free software car computer solution?</a>
6297       </div>
6298       <div class="date">
6299         29th May 2014
6300       </div>
6301       <div class="body">
6302         <p>Dear lazyweb.  I'm planning to set up a small Raspberry Pi computer
6303 in my car, connected to
6304 <a href="http://www.dx.com/p/400a-4-0-tft-lcd-digital-monitor-for-vehicle-parking-reverse-camera-1440x272-12v-dc-57776">a
6305 small screen</a> next to the rear mirror.  I plan to hook it up with a
6306 GPS and a USB wifi card too.  The idea is to get my own
6307 "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carputer">Carputer</a>".  But I
6308 wonder if someone already created a good free software solution for
6309 such car computer.</p>
6310
6311 <p>This is my current wish list for such system:</p>
6312
6313 <ul>
6314
6315  <li>Work on Raspberry Pi.</li>
6316
6317  <li>Show current speed limit based on location, and warn if going too
6318    fast (for example using color codes yellow and red on the screen,
6319    or make a sound).  This could be done either using either data from
6320    <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">Openstreetmap</a> or OCR
6321    info gathered from a dashboard camera.</li>
6322
6323  <li>Track automatic toll road passes and their cost, show total spent
6324    and make it possible to calculate toll costs for planned
6325    route.</li>
6326
6327  <li>Collect GPX tracks for use with OpenStreetMap.</li>
6328
6329  <li>Automatically detect and use any wireless connection to connect
6330    to home server.  Try IP over DNS
6331    (<a href="http://dev.kryo.se/iodine/">iodine</a>) or ICMP
6332    (<a href="http://code.gerade.org/hans/">Hans</a>) if direct
6333    connection do not work.</li>
6334
6335  <li>Set up mesh network to talk to other cars with the same system,
6336    or some standard car mesh protocol.</li>
6337
6338  <li>Warn when approaching speed cameras and speed camera ranges
6339    (speed calculated between two cameras).</li>
6340
6341  <li>Suport dashboard/front facing camera to discover speed limits and
6342    run OCR to track registration number of passing cars.</li>
6343
6344 </ul>
6345
6346 <p>If you know of any free software car computer system supporting
6347 some or all of these features, please let me know.</p>
6348
6349       </div>
6350       <div class="tags">
6351
6352
6353         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6354
6355
6356       </div>
6357     </div>
6358     <div class="padding"></div>
6359
6360     <div class="entry">
6361       <div class="title">
6362         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_the_Coverity_issues_in_Gnash_fixed_in_the_next_release.html">Half the Coverity issues in Gnash fixed in the next release</a>
6363       </div>
6364       <div class="date">
6365         29th April 2014
6366       </div>
6367       <div class="body">
6368         <p>I've been following <a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">the Gnash
6369 project</a> for quite a while now.  It is a free software
6370 implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser
6371 plugin.  Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the
6372 newer AVM2 format - see
6373 <a href="http://lightspark.github.io/">Lightspark</a> for that one),
6374 allowing several flash based sites to work.  Thanks to the friendly
6375 developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the
6376 Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to
6377 those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2
6378 support, but it has not happened yet.  If you install both Lightspark
6379 and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file,
6380 so you can get both handled as free software.  Unfortunately,
6381 Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many
6382 sites do not work yet.</p>
6383
6384 <p>A few months ago, I started looking at
6385 <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/">Coverity</a>, the static source
6386 checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks
6387 to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the
6388 company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of
6389 the projects I decided to check out.  Coverity is able to find lock
6390 errors, memory errors, dead code and more.  A few days ago they even
6391 extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
6392 There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the
6393 amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static
6394 code checkers I have tested over the years.</p>
6395
6396 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I've been working with the other Gnash
6397 developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity.  I was quite happy
6398 today when I checked the current status and saw that of the 777 issues
6399 detected so far, 374 are marked as fixed.  This make me confident that
6400 the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than
6401 the previous one.  Most of the reported issues were and are in the
6402 test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code.</p>
6403
6404 <p>If you want to help out, you find us on
6405 <a href="https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev">the
6406 gnash-dev mailing list</a> and on
6407 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnash">the #gnash channel on
6408 irc.freenode.net IRC server</a>.</p>
6409
6410       </div>
6411       <div class="tags">
6412
6413
6414         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>.
6415
6416
6417       </div>
6418     </div>
6419     <div class="padding"></div>
6420
6421     <div class="entry">
6422       <div class="title">
6423         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Install_hardware_dependent_packages_using_tasksel__Isenkram_0_7_.html">Install hardware dependent packages using tasksel (Isenkram 0.7)</a>
6424       </div>
6425       <div class="date">
6426         23rd April 2014
6427       </div>
6428       <div class="body">
6429         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
6430 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
6431 So I implemented one, using
6432 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
6433 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
6434 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
6435 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
6436 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
6437 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
6438
6439 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
6440 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
6441 packages to install.  The first part is in
6442 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
6443 this:</p>
6444
6445 <p><blockquote><pre>
6446 Task: isenkram
6447 Section: hardware
6448 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
6449  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
6450  proposed.
6451 Test-new-install: mark show
6452 Relevance: 8
6453 Packages: for-current-hardware
6454 </pre></blockquote></p>
6455
6456 <p>The second part is in
6457 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
6458 this:</p>
6459
6460 <p><blockquote><pre>
6461 #!/bin/sh
6462 #
6463 (
6464     isenkram-lookup
6465     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
6466 ) | sort -u
6467 </pre></blockquote></p>
6468
6469 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
6470 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
6471 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
6472 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
6473 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
6474 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
6475
6476 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
6477 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
6478 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
6479 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
6480 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
6481 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
6482 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
6483 the python-apt code (bug
6484 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
6485 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
6486 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
6487 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
6488 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
6489 unstable today.</p>
6490
6491 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
6492 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
6493 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
6494 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
6495 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
6496 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
6497 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
6498 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
6499 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
6500
6501 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
6502 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
6503 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
6504 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
6505 package.  See also
6506 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
6507 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
6508 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
6509 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
6510
6511       </div>
6512       <div class="tags">
6513
6514
6515         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>.
6516
6517
6518       </div>
6519     </div>
6520     <div class="padding"></div>
6521
6522     <div class="entry">
6523       <div class="title">
6524         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html">FreedomBox milestone - all packages now in Debian Sid</a>
6525       </div>
6526       <div class="date">
6527         15th April 2014
6528       </div>
6529       <div class="body">
6530         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
6531 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
6532 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
6533 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
6534 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
6535 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
6536
6537 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
6538 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
6539 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
6540 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
6541 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
6542 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
6543 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
6544
6545 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
6546 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
6547 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
6548 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
6549 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
6550 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
6551 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
6552 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
6553 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
6554 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
6555 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
6556 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
6557
6558 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
6559 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
6560 become root:</p>
6561
6562 <p><pre>
6563 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
6564   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
6565   u-boot-tools
6566 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
6567   freedom-maker
6568 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
6569 </pre></p>
6570
6571 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
6572 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
6573 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
6574 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
6575 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
6576 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
6577 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
6578 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
6579
6580 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
6581 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
6582 the preseed values:</p>
6583
6584 <p><pre>
6585 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
6586 </pre></p>
6587
6588 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
6589 it still work.</p>
6590
6591 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
6592 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
6593 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
6594 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
6595 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
6596 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
6597 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
6598
6599 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
6600 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
6601 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
6602 irc.debian.org)</a> and
6603 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
6604 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
6605
6606       </div>
6607       <div class="tags">
6608
6609
6610         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>.
6611
6612
6613       </div>
6614     </div>
6615     <div class="padding"></div>
6616
6617     <div class="entry">
6618       <div class="title">
6619         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html">S3QL, a locally mounted cloud file system - nice free software</a>
6620       </div>
6621       <div class="date">
6622          9th April 2014
6623       </div>
6624       <div class="body">
6625         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
6626 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
6627 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
6628 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
6629 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
6630 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
6631 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
6632 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
6633 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
6634 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
6635 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
6636 have looked at a system called
6637 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
6638 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
6639
6640 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
6641 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
6642 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
6643 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
6644 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
6645 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
6646 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
6647 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
6648 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
6649 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
6650 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
6651 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
6652 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
6653
6654 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
6655 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
6656 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
6657 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
6658 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
6659 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
6660 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
6661 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
6662 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
6663 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
6664 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
6665 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
6666 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
6667 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
6668 account.</p>
6669
6670 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
6671 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
6672 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
6673 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
6674 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
6675 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
6676 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
6677
6678 <p><blockquote><pre>
6679 [s3c]
6680 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
6681 backend-login: API-login
6682 backend-password: API-password
6683 fs-passphrase: local-password
6684 </pre></blockquote></p>
6685
6686 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
6687 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
6688 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
6689 details and password to create it:</p>
6690
6691 <p><blockquote><pre>
6692 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
6693 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
6694   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
6695 Enter backend login:
6696 Enter backend password:
6697 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
6698 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
6699 Enter encryption password:
6700 Confirm encryption password:
6701 Generating random encryption key...
6702 Creating metadata tables...
6703 Dumping metadata...
6704 ..objects..
6705 ..blocks..
6706 ..inodes..
6707 ..inode_blocks..
6708 ..symlink_targets..
6709 ..names..
6710 ..contents..
6711 ..ext_attributes..
6712 Compressing and uploading metadata...
6713 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
6714 # </pre></blockquote></p>
6715
6716 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
6717
6718 <p><blockquote><pre>
6719 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
6720   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
6721 Using 4 upload threads.
6722 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
6723 Reading metadata...
6724 ..objects..
6725 ..blocks..
6726 ..inodes..
6727 ..inode_blocks..
6728 ..symlink_targets..
6729 ..names..
6730 ..contents..
6731 ..ext_attributes..
6732 Mounting filesystem...
6733 # df -h /s3ql
6734 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
6735 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
6736 #
6737 </pre></blockquote></p>
6738
6739 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
6740 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
6741 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
6742 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
6743 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
6744 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
6745
6746 <p><blockquote><pre>
6747 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
6748 #
6749 </pre></blockquote></p>
6750
6751 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
6752 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
6753 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
6754 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
6755 file system:</p>
6756
6757 <p><blockquote><pre>
6758 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
6759 Using cached metadata.
6760 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
6761 Checking DB integrity...
6762 Creating temporary extra indices...
6763 Checking lost+found...
6764 Checking cached objects...
6765 Checking names (refcounts)...
6766 Checking contents (names)...
6767 Checking contents (inodes)...
6768 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
6769 Checking objects (reference counts)...
6770 Checking objects (backend)...
6771 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
6772 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
6773 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
6774 Checking objects (sizes)...
6775 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
6776 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
6777 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
6778 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
6779 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
6780 Checking inodes (sizes)...
6781 Checking extended attributes (names)...
6782 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
6783 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
6784 Checking directory reachability...
6785 Checking unix conventions...
6786 Checking referential integrity...
6787 Dropping temporary indices...
6788 Backing up old metadata...
6789 Dumping metadata...
6790 ..objects..
6791 ..blocks..
6792 ..inodes..
6793 ..inode_blocks..
6794 ..symlink_targets..
6795 ..names..
6796 ..contents..
6797 ..ext_attributes..
6798 Compressing and uploading metadata...
6799 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
6800 #
6801 </pre></blockquote></p>
6802
6803 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
6804 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
6805 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
6806 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
6807 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
6808 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
6809 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
6810 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
6811 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
6812 working set.</p>
6813
6814 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
6815 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
6816 busy:</p>
6817
6818 <p><blockquote><pre>
6819 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
6820   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
6821 Using 8 upload threads.
6822 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
6823 #
6824 </pre></blockquote></p>
6825
6826 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
6827 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
6828 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
6829 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
6830 s3qlctrl:
6831
6832 <p><blockquote><pre>
6833 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
6834 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
6835 #
6836 </pre></blockquote></p>
6837
6838 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
6839 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
6840 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
6841 a report:</p>
6842
6843 <p><blockquote><pre>
6844 # s3qlstat /s3ql
6845 Directory entries:    9141
6846 Inodes:               9143
6847 Data blocks:          8851
6848 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
6849 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
6850 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
6851 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
6852 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
6853 #
6854 </pre></blockquote></p>
6855
6856 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
6857 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
6858 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
6859 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
6860 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
6861 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
6862 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
6863 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
6864 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
6865 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
6866 best.</p>
6867
6868 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
6869 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
6870 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
6871 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
6872 poster is titled
6873 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
6874 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
6875 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
6876 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
6877 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
6878
6879 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
6880 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
6881 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
6882 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
6883 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
6884 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
6885 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
6886 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
6887
6888 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
6889 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
6890 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
6891 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
6892 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
6893 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
6894 only read from it.</p>
6895
6896 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6897 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6898 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6899
6900       </div>
6901       <div class="tags">
6902
6903
6904         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
6905
6906
6907       </div>
6908     </div>
6909     <div class="padding"></div>
6910
6911     <div class="entry">
6912       <div class="title">
6913         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ReactOS_Windows_clone___nice_free_software.html">ReactOS Windows clone - nice free software</a>
6914       </div>
6915       <div class="date">
6916          1st April 2014
6917       </div>
6918       <div class="body">
6919         <p>Microsoft have announced that Windows XP reaches its end of life
6920 2014-04-08, in 7 days.  But there are heaps of machines still running
6921 Windows XP, and depending on Windows XP to run their applications, and
6922 upgrading will be expensive, both when it comes to money and when it
6923 comes to the amount of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP to a
6924 new operating system.  Some obvious options (buy new a Windows
6925 machine, buy a MacOSX machine, install Linux on the existing machine)
6926 are already well known and covered elsewhere.  Most of them involve
6927 leaving the user applications installed on Windows XP behind and
6928 trying out replacements or updated versions. In this blog post I want
6929 to mention one strange bird that allow people to keep the hardware and
6930 the existing Windows XP applications and run them on a free software
6931 operating system that is Windows XP compatible.</p>
6932
6933 <p><a href="http://www.reactos.org/">ReactOS</a> is a free software
6934 operating system (GNU GPL licensed) working on providing a operating
6935 system that is binary compatible with Windows, able to run windows
6936 programs directly and to use Windows drivers for hardware directly.
6937 The project goal is for Windows user to keep their existing machines,
6938 drivers and software, and gain the advantages from user a operating
6939 system without usage limitations caused by non-free licensing.  It is
6940 a Windows clone running directly on the hardware, so quite different
6941 from the approach taken by <a href="http://www.winehq.org/">the Wine
6942 project</a>, which make it possible to run Windows binaries on
6943 Linux.</p>
6944
6945 <p>The ReactOS project share code with the Wine project, so most
6946 shared libraries available on Windows are already implemented already.
6947 There is also a software manager like the one we are used to on Linux,
6948 allowing the user to install free software applications with a simple
6949 click directly from the Internet.  Check out the
6950 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/screenshots">screen shots on the
6951 project web site</a> for an idea what it look like (it looks just like
6952 Windows before metro).</p>
6953
6954 <p>I do not use ReactOS myself, preferring Linux and Unix like
6955 operating systems.  I've tested it, and it work fine in a virt-manager
6956 virtual machine.  The browser, minesweeper, notepad etc is working
6957 fine as far as I can tell.  Unfortunately, my main test application
6958 is the software included on a CD with the Lego Mindstorms NXT, which
6959 seem to install just fine from CD but fail to leave any binaries on
6960 the disk after the installation.  So no luck with that test software.
6961 No idea why, but hope someone else figure out and fix the problem.
6962 I've tried the ReactOS Live ISO on a physical machine, and it seemed
6963 to work just fine.  If you like Windows and want to keep running your
6964 old Windows binaries, check it out by
6965 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/download">downloading</a> the
6966 installation CD, the live CD or the preinstalled virtual machine
6967 image.</p>
6968
6969       </div>
6970       <div class="tags">
6971
6972
6973         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos</a>.
6974
6975
6976       </div>
6977     </div>
6978     <div class="padding"></div>
6979
6980     <div class="entry">
6981       <div class="title">
6982         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html">Debian Edu interview: Roger Marsal</a>
6983       </div>
6984       <div class="date">
6985         30th March 2014
6986       </div>
6987       <div class="body">
6988         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
6989 keep gaining new users.  Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
6990 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>, with a
6991 wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
6992 contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.</p>
6993
6994 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
6995
6996 <p>My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I
6997 live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I
6998 work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent.  Additionally,
6999 I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
7000 last development phase of a new social networking concept.</p>
7001
7002 <p>I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
7003 ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
7004 and as a necessary step to gain expertise.</p>
7005
7006 <p>In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
7007 can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
7008 hunger.</p>
7009
7010 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
7011 project?</strong></p>
7012
7013 <p>I discovered the <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP</a> advantages
7014 with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I
7015 started looking for an alternative.  Even though I highly value and
7016 respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
7017 change to a more robust and stable alternative.  As far as I was using
7018 Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
7019 Debian and configure an LTSP server myself.  Surprised, I discovered
7020 that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
7021 and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
7022 running.  I just loved it.</p>
7023
7024 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
7025 Edu?</strong></p>
7026
7027 <p>I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and
7028 tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most
7029 complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the
7030 other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
7031 be made of steel.</p>
7032
7033 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
7034 Edu?</strong></p>
7035
7036 <p>I found two main disadvantages.</p>
7037
7038 <p>I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
7039 amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite
7040 stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few
7041 resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
7042 or dropped.</p>
7043
7044 <p>It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
7045 this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
7046 more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
7047 discourage many people too.</p>
7048
7049 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
7050
7051 <p>I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
7052 Virtualbox.</p>
7053
7054
7055 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
7056 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
7057
7058 <p>I don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
7059 attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will
7060 really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
7061 the <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">"R" statistical language</a>; a
7062 few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
7063 Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
7064 different level of studies.  I believe free and open software will
7065 increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the
7066 first scenarios where this will happen.</p>
7067
7068       </div>
7069       <div class="tags">
7070
7071
7072         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>.
7073
7074
7075       </div>
7076     </div>
7077     <div class="padding"></div>
7078
7079     <div class="entry">
7080       <div class="title">
7081         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">Public Trusted Timestamping services for everyone</a>
7082       </div>
7083       <div class="date">
7084         25th March 2014
7085       </div>
7086       <div class="body">
7087         <p>Did you ever need to store logs or other files in a way that would
7088 allow it to be used as evidence in court, and needed a way to
7089 demonstrate without reasonable doubt that the file had not been
7090 changed since it was created?  Or, did you ever need to document that
7091 a given document was received at some point in time, like some
7092 archived document or the answer to an exam, and not changed after it
7093 was received?  The problem in these settings is to remove the need to
7094 trust yourself and your computers, while still being able to prove
7095 that a file is the same as it was at some given time in the past.</p>
7096
7097 <p>A solution to these problems is to have a trusted third party
7098 "stamp" the document and verify that at some given time the document
7099 looked a given way.  Such
7100 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notarius">notarius</a> service
7101 have been around for thousands of years, and its digital equivalent is
7102 called a
7103 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
7104 timestamping service</a>.  <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">The Internet
7105 Engineering Task Force</a> standardised how such service could work a
7106 few years ago as <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC
7107 3161</a>.  The mechanism is simple.  Create a hash of the file in
7108 question, send it to a trusted third party which add a time stamp to
7109 the hash and sign the result with its private key, and send back the
7110 signed hash + timestamp.  Both email, FTP and HTTP can be used to
7111 request such signature, depending on what is provided by the service
7112 used. Anyone with the document and the signature can then verify that
7113 the document matches the signature by creating their own hash and
7114 checking the signature using the trusted third party public key.
7115 There are several commercial services around providing such
7116 timestamping.  A quick search for
7117 "<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rfc+3161+service">rfc 3161
7118 service</a>" pointed me to at least
7119 <a href="https://www.digistamp.com/technical/how-a-digital-time-stamp-works/">DigiStamp</a>,
7120 <a href="http://www.quovadisglobal.co.uk/CertificateServices/SigningServices/TimeStamp.aspx">Quo
7121 Vadis</a>,
7122 <a href="https://www.globalsign.com/timestamp-service/">Global Sign</a>
7123 and <a href="http://www.globaltrustfinder.com/TSADefault.aspx">Global
7124 Trust Finder</a>.  The system work as long as the private key of the
7125 trusted third party is not compromised.</p>
7126
7127 <p>But as far as I can tell, there are very few public trusted
7128 timestamp services available for everyone.  I've been looking for one
7129 for a while now. But yesterday I found one over at
7130 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">Deutches
7131 Forschungsnetz</a> mentioned in
7132 <a href="http://www.d-mueller.de/blog/dealing-with-trusted-timestamps-in-php-rfc-3161/">a
7133 blog by David Müller</a>.  I then found
7134 <a href="http://www.rz.uni-greifswald.de/support/dfn-pki-zertifikate/zeitstempeldienst.html">a
7135 good recipe on how to use the service</a> over at the University of
7136 Greifswald.</p>
7137
7138 <p><a href="http://www.openssl.org/">The OpenSSL library</a> contain
7139 both server and tools to use and set up your own signing service.  See
7140 the ts(1SSL), tsget(1SSL) manual pages for more details.  The
7141 following shell script demonstrate how to extract a signed timestamp
7142 for any file on the disk in a Debian environment:</p>
7143
7144 <p><blockquote><pre>
7145 #!/bin/sh
7146 set -e
7147 url="http://zeitstempel.dfn.de"
7148 caurl="https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt"
7149 reqfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsq)
7150 resfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsr)
7151 cafile=chain.txt
7152 if [ ! -f $cafile ] ; then
7153     wget -O $cafile "$caurl"
7154 fi
7155 openssl ts -query -data "$1" -cert | tee "$reqfile" \
7156     | /usr/lib/ssl/misc/tsget -h "$url" -o "$resfile"
7157 openssl ts -reply -in "$resfile" -text 1>&2
7158 openssl ts -verify -data "$1" -in "$resfile" -CAfile "$cafile" 1>&2
7159 base64 < "$resfile"
7160 rm "$reqfile" "$resfile"
7161 </pre></blockquote></p>
7162
7163 <p>The argument to the script is the file to timestamp, and the output
7164 is a base64 encoded version of the signature to STDOUT and details
7165 about the signature to STDERR.  Note that due to
7166 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742553">a bug
7167 in the tsget script</a>, you might need to modify the included script
7168 and remove the last line.  Or just write your own HTTP uploader using
7169 curl. :) Now you too can prove and verify that files have not been
7170 changed.</p>
7171
7172 <p>But the Internet need more public trusted timestamp services.
7173 Perhaps something for <a href="http://www.uninett.no/">Uninett</a> or
7174 my work place the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
7175 to set up?</p>
7176
7177       </div>
7178       <div class="tags">
7179
7180
7181         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
7182
7183
7184       </div>
7185     </div>
7186     <div class="padding"></div>
7187
7188     <div class="entry">
7189       <div class="title">
7190         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Video_DVD_reader_library___python_dvdvideo___nice_free_software.html">Video DVD reader library / python-dvdvideo - nice free software</a>
7191       </div>
7192       <div class="date">
7193         21st March 2014
7194       </div>
7195       <div class="body">
7196         <p>Keeping your DVD collection safe from scratches and curious
7197 children fingers while still having it available when you want to see a
7198 movie is not straight forward.  My preferred method at the moment is
7199 to store a full copy of the ISO on a hard drive, and use VLC, Popcorn
7200 Hour or other useful players to view the resulting file.  This way the
7201 subtitles and bonus material are still available and using the ISO is
7202 just like inserting the original DVD record in the DVD player.</p>
7203
7204 <p>Earlier I used dd for taking security copies, but it do not handle
7205 DVDs giving read errors (which are quite a few of them).  I've also
7206 tried using
7207 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">dvdbackup
7208 and genisoimage</a>, but these days I use the marvellous python library
7209 and program
7210 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">python-dvdvideo</a>
7211 written by Bastian Blank.  It is
7212 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/python-dvdvideo.html">in Debian
7213 already</a> and the binary package name is python3-dvdvideo. Instead
7214 of trying to read every block from the DVD, it parses the file
7215 structure and figure out which block on the DVD is actually in used,
7216 and only read those blocks from the DVD.  This work surprisingly well,
7217 and I have been able to almost backup my entire DVD collection using
7218 this method.</p>
7219
7220 <p>So far, python-dvdvideo have failed on between 10 and
7221 20 DVDs, which is a small fraction of my collection.  The most common
7222 problem is
7223 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=720831">DVDs
7224 using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 characters</a>, which according to
7225 Bastian is against the DVD specification (and seem to cause some
7226 players to fail too).  A rarer problem is what seem to be inconsistent
7227 DVD structures, as the python library
7228 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=723079">claim
7229 there is a overlap between objects</a>.  An equally rare problem claim
7230 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=741878">some
7231 value is out of range</a>.  No idea what is going on there.  I wish I
7232 knew enough about the DVD format to fix these, to ensure my movie
7233 collection will stay with me in the future.</p>
7234
7235 <p>So, if you need to keep your DVDs safe, back them up using
7236 python-dvdvideo. :)</p>
7237
7238       </div>
7239       <div class="tags">
7240
7241
7242         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
7243
7244
7245       </div>
7246     </div>
7247     <div class="padding"></div>
7248
7249     <div class="entry">
7250       <div class="title">
7251         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Freedombox_on_Dreamplug__Raspberry_Pi_and_virtual_x86_machine.html">Freedombox on Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and virtual x86 machine</a>
7252       </div>
7253       <div class="date">
7254         14th March 2014
7255       </div>
7256       <div class="body">
7257         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
7258 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
7259 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
7260 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
7261 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
7262 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
7263 release (0.2).</p>
7264
7265 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
7266 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
7267 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
7268 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
7269 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
7270 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
7271 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
7272 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
7273 and build using
7274 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
7275 with a user with sudo access to become root:
7276
7277 <pre>
7278 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
7279   freedom-maker
7280 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
7281   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
7282   u-boot-tools
7283 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
7284 </pre>
7285
7286 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
7287 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
7288 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
7289 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
7290 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
7291 kpartx call.</p>
7292
7293 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
7294 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
7295 the preseed values:</p>
7296
7297 <pre>
7298 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
7299 </pre>
7300
7301 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
7302 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
7303 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
7304 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
7305 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
7306 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
7307
7308 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
7309 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
7310 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
7311 irc.debian.org)</a> and
7312 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
7313 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
7314
7315       </div>
7316       <div class="tags">
7317
7318
7319         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>.
7320
7321
7322       </div>
7323     </div>
7324     <div class="padding"></div>
7325
7326     <div class="entry">
7327       <div class="title">
7328         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_add_extra_storage_servers_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">How to add extra storage servers in Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
7329       </div>
7330       <div class="date">
7331         12th March 2014
7332       </div>
7333       <div class="body">
7334         <p>On larger sites, it is useful to use a dedicated storage server for
7335 storing user home directories and data.  The design for handling this
7336 in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, is
7337 to update the automount rules in LDAP and let the automount daemon on
7338 the clients take care of the rest.  I was reminded about the need to
7339 document this better when one of the customers of
7340 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a>, where I am
7341 on the board of directors, asked about how to do this.  The steps to
7342 get this working are the following:</p>
7343
7344 <p><ol>
7345
7346 <li>Add new storage server in DNS.  I use nas-server.intern as the
7347 example host here.</li>
7348
7349 <li>Add automoun LDAP information about this server in LDAP, to allow
7350 all clients to automatically mount it on reqeust.</li>
7351
7352 <li>Add the relevant entries in tjener.intern:/etc/fstab, because
7353 tjener.intern do not use automount to avoid mounting loops.</li>
7354
7355 </ol></p>
7356
7357 <p>DNS entries are added in GOsa², and not described here.  Follow the
7358 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/GettingStarted">instructions
7359 in the manual</a> (Machine Management with GOsa² in section Getting
7360 started).</p>
7361
7362 <p>Ensure that the NFS export points on the server are exported to the
7363 relevant subnets or machines:</p>
7364
7365 <p><blockquote><pre>
7366 root@tjener:~# showmount -e nas-server
7367 Export list for nas-server:
7368 /storage         10.0.0.0/8
7369 root@tjener:~#
7370 </pre></blockquote></p>
7371
7372 <p>Here everything on the backbone network is granted access to the
7373 /storage export.  With NFSv3 it is slightly better to limit it to
7374 netgroup membership or single IP addresses to have some limits on the
7375 NFS access.</p>
7376
7377 <p>The next step is to update LDAP.  This can not be done using GOsa²,
7378 because it lack a module for automount.  Instead, use ldapvi and add
7379 the required LDAP objects using an editor.</p>
7380
7381 <p><blockquote><pre>
7382 ldapvi --ldap-conf -ZD '(cn=admin)' -b ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
7383 </pre></blockquote></p>
7384
7385 <p>When the editor show up, add the following LDAP objects at the
7386 bottom of the document.  The "/&" part in the last LDAP object is a
7387 wild card matching everything the nas-server exports, removing the
7388 need to list individual mount points in LDAP.</p>
7389
7390 <p><blockquote><pre>
7391 add cn=nas-server,ou=auto.skole,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
7392 objectClass: automount
7393 cn: nas-server
7394 automountInformation: -fstype=autofs --timeout=60 ldap:ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
7395
7396 add ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
7397 objectClass: top
7398 objectClass: automountMap
7399 ou: auto.nas-server
7400
7401 add cn=/,ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
7402 objectClass: automount
7403 cn: /
7404 automountInformation: -fstype=nfs,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,rw,intr,hard,nodev,nosuid,noatime nas-server.intern:/&
7405 </pre></blockquote></p>
7406
7407 <p>The last step to remember is to mount the relevant mount points in
7408 tjener.intern by adding them to /etc/fstab, creating the mount
7409 directories using mkdir and running "mount -a" to mount them.</p>
7410
7411 <p>When this is done, your users should be able to access the files on
7412 the storage server directly by just visiting the
7413 /tjener/nas-server/storage/ directory using any application on any
7414 workstation, LTSP client or LTSP server.</p>
7415
7416       </div>
7417       <div class="tags">
7418
7419
7420         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>.
7421
7422
7423       </div>
7424     </div>
7425     <div class="padding"></div>
7426
7427     <div class="entry">
7428       <div class="title">
7429         <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>
7430       </div>
7431       <div class="date">
7432         22nd February 2014
7433       </div>
7434       <div class="body">
7435         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
7436 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
7437 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
7438 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
7439 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
7440 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
7441 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
7442 proper home since then.</p>
7443
7444 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
7445 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
7446 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
7447 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
7448 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
7449
7450 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
7451 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
7452 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
7453 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
7454 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
7455 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
7456 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
7457 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
7458 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
7459
7460       </div>
7461       <div class="tags">
7462
7463
7464         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>.
7465
7466
7467       </div>
7468     </div>
7469     <div class="padding"></div>
7470
7471     <div class="entry">
7472       <div class="title">
7473         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
7474       </div>
7475       <div class="date">
7476          3rd February 2014
7477       </div>
7478       <div class="body">
7479         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
7480 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
7481 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
7482 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
7483 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
7484 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
7485 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
7486 <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>,
7487 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
7488
7489 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
7490 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
7491 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
7492 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
7493 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
7494 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
7495
7496 <p><blockquote><pre>
7497 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
7498 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
7499 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
7500 dhclient /dev/eth0
7501 </pre></blockquote></p>
7502
7503 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
7504 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
7505 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
7506
7507 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
7508 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
7509 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
7510 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
7511 side.</p>
7512
7513 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
7514 stuff:</p>
7515
7516 <p><blockquote><pre>
7517 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
7518 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
7519 EOF
7520 apt-get update
7521 apt-get dist-upgrade
7522 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
7523     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
7524 update-alternatives --config runsystem
7525 </pre></blockquote></p>
7526
7527 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
7528 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
7529 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
7530 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
7531 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
7532 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
7533 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
7534 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
7535 ssh instead.
7536
7537 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
7538 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
7539 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
7540 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
7541 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
7542 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
7543
7544 <p><blockquote><pre>
7545 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
7546 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
7547 EOF
7548 </pre></blockquote></p>
7549
7550 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
7551 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
7552 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
7553 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
7554
7555 <p><blockquote><pre>
7556 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
7557 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
7558 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
7559 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
7560 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
7561 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
7562 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
7563 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
7564 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
7565 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
7566 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
7567 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
7568 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
7569 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
7570 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
7571 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
7572 #
7573 </pre></blockquote></p>
7574
7575 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
7576 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
7577 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
7578 command line stuff.<p>
7579
7580       </div>
7581       <div class="tags">
7582
7583
7584         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>.
7585
7586
7587       </div>
7588     </div>
7589     <div class="padding"></div>
7590
7591     <div class="entry">
7592       <div class="title">
7593         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html">A fist full of non-anonymous Bitcoins</a>
7594       </div>
7595       <div class="date">
7596         29th January 2014
7597       </div>
7598       <div class="body">
7599         <p>Bitcoin is a incredible use of peer to peer communication and
7600 encryption, allowing direct and immediate money transfer without any
7601 central control.  It is sometimes claimed to be ideal for illegal
7602 activity, which I believe is quite a long way from the truth.  At least
7603 I would not conduct illegal money transfers using a system where the
7604 details of every transaction are kept forever.  This point is
7605 investigated in
7606 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">USENIX ;login:</a>
7607 from December 2013, in the article
7608 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/03_meiklejohn-online.pdf">A
7609 Fistful of Bitcoins - Characterizing Payments Among Men with No
7610 Names</a>" by Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole,Grant Jordan, Kirill
7611 Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage.  They
7612 analyse the transaction log in the Bitcoin system, using it to find
7613 addresses belong to individuals and organisations and follow the flow
7614 of money from both Bitcoin theft and trades on Silk Road to where the
7615 money end up.  This is how they wrap up their article:</p>
7616
7617 <p><blockquote>
7618 <p>"To demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analysis, we turned
7619 our attention to criminal activity. In the Bitcoin economy, criminal
7620 activity can appear in a number of forms, such as dealing drugs on
7621 Silk Road or simply stealing someone else’s bitcoins. We followed the
7622 flow of bitcoins out of Silk Road (in particular, from one notorious
7623 address) and from a number of highly publicized thefts to see whether
7624 we could track the bitcoins to known services. Although some of the
7625 thieves attempted to use sophisticated mixing techniques (or possibly
7626 mix services) to obscure the flow of bitcoins, for the most part
7627 tracking the bitcoins was quite straightforward, and we ultimately saw
7628 large quantities of bitcoins flow to a variety of exchanges directly
7629 from the point of theft (or the withdrawal from Silk Road).</p>
7630
7631 <p>As acknowledged above, following stolen bitcoins to the point at
7632 which they are deposited into an exchange does not in itself identify
7633 the thief; however, it does enable further de-anonymization in the
7634 case in which certain agencies can determine (through, for example,
7635 subpoena power) the real-world owner of the account into which the
7636 stolen bitcoins were deposited.  Because such exchanges seem to serve
7637 as chokepoints into and out of the Bitcoin economy (i.e., there are
7638 few alternative ways to cash out), we conclude that using Bitcoin for
7639 money laundering or other illicit purposes does not (at least at
7640 present) seem to be particularly attractive."</p>
7641 </blockquote><p>
7642
7643 <p>These researches are not the first to analyse the Bitcoin
7644 transaction log.  The 2011 paper
7645 "<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524">An Analysis of Anonymity in
7646 the Bitcoin System</A>" by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan is
7647 summarized like this:</p>
7648
7649 <p><blockquote>
7650 "Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a
7651 complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by
7652 public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will
7653 attempt to construct the one-to-many mapping between users and
7654 public-keys and associate information external to the system with the
7655 users. Bitcoin tries to prevent this attack by storing the mapping of
7656 a user to his or her public-keys on that user's node only and by
7657 allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In
7658 this chapter we consider the topological structure of two networks
7659 derived from Bitcoin's public transaction history. We show that the
7660 two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide
7661 complementary views of the Bitcoin system and have implications for
7662 anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and
7663 techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate
7664 an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a
7665 market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars."
7666 </blockquote></p>
7667
7668 <p>I hope these references can help kill the urban myth that Bitcoin
7669 is anonymous.  It isn't really a good fit for illegal activites.  Use
7670 cash if you need to stay anonymous, at least until regular DNA
7671 sampling of notes and coins become the norm. :)</p>
7672
7673 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
7674 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
7675 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
7676
7677       </div>
7678       <div class="tags">
7679
7680
7681         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix</a>.
7682
7683
7684       </div>
7685     </div>
7686     <div class="padding"></div>
7687
7688     <div class="entry">
7689       <div class="title">
7690         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
7691       </div>
7692       <div class="date">
7693         14th January 2014
7694       </div>
7695       <div class="body">
7696         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
7697 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
7698 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
7699 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
7700 the source.  The company behind it provide
7701 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
7702 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
7703 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
7704 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
7705 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
7706 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
7707 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
7708 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
7709 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
7710 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
7711 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
7712 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
7713 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
7714 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
7715 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
7716 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
7717 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
7718 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
7719 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
7720
7721 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
7722
7723 <ul>
7724
7725   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
7726   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
7727   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
7728
7729 </ul>
7730
7731 <p>You can
7732 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
7733 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
7734 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
7735 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
7736 include a test suite check.</p>
7737
7738       </div>
7739       <div class="tags">
7740
7741
7742         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>.
7743
7744
7745       </div>
7746     </div>
7747     <div class="padding"></div>
7748
7749     <div class="entry">
7750       <div class="title">
7751         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html">Debian Edu interview: Dominik George</a>
7752       </div>
7753       <div class="date">
7754         25th December 2013
7755       </div>
7756       <div class="body">
7757         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7758 project</a> consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
7759 was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
7760 up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
7761 successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School.  Say hello
7762 to <a href="https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Natureshadow">Dominik
7763 George</a>.</p>
7764
7765 <!-- http://www.dominik-george.de/images/foto.jpg -->
7766
7767 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
7768
7769 <p>I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
7770 life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
7771 student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
7772 Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
7773 voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
7774 a bit vacant right now however.</p>
7775
7776 <p>I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
7777 (public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
7778 around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
7779 it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
7780 network of that school together with a team of very interested and
7781 talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
7782 learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
7783 to help building another school's informational education concept from
7784 scratch.</p>
7785
7786 <p>That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
7787 and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
7788 ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.</p>
7789
7790 <p>When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
7791 and cycling.</p>
7792
7793 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
7794 project?</strong></p>
7795
7796 <p>I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
7797 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">FrOSCon</a> and visited the project
7798 booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
7799 have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
7800 own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
7801 "out-of-the-box" solution ;).</p>
7802
7803 <p>The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
7804 <a href="http://www.openrheinruhr.de">OpenRheinRuhr</a> 2011 when the
7805 BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
7806 really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
7807 ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
7808 a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
7809 guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
7810 small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
7811 seemed rather uninterested.</p>
7812
7813 <p>After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
7814 mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
7815 reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
7816 basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!</p>
7817
7818 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
7819 Edu?</strong></p>
7820
7821 <p>The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
7822 works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
7823 in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
7824 without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
7825 from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
7826 have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
7827 and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
7828 server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
7829 notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
7830 and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
7831 it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
7832 tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
7833 that it rocks!</p>
7834
7835 <p>Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
7836 politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
7837 operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
7838 will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
7839 school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
7840 this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
7841 too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).</p>
7842
7843 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
7844 Edu?</strong></p>
7845
7846 <p>I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
7847 answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
7848 other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
7849 can list a few points about that:</p>
7850
7851 <ul>
7852
7853  <li>always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
7854  <li>be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
7855  <li>be helpful at being helpful ;)
7856
7857 </ul>
7858
7859 <p>I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!</p>
7860
7861 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
7862
7863 <p>First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
7864 all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
7865 year.</p>
7866
7867 <p>I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
7868 run text tools. I use
7869 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a> as shell,
7870 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm">jupp</a> as very advanced
7871 text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
7872 based full-featured student management software with the two),
7873 <a href="http://mcabber.com/">mcabber</a> for XMPP and
7874 <a href="http://www.irssi.org/">irssi</a> for IRC. For that overly
7875 coloured world called the WWW, I use
7876 <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/">Iceweasel
7877 (Firefox)</a>. Oh, and <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a> for
7878 e-mail.</p>
7879
7880 <p>However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
7881 are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
7882 least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
7883 kids. One of these things is <a href="http://jappix.org/">Jappix</a>,
7884 which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
7885 Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
7886 Facebook now ;).</p>
7887
7888 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
7889 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
7890
7891 <p>Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
7892 side is what I have experienced.</p>
7893
7894 <p>I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
7895 that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
7896 grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
7897 to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
7898 see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
7899 students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
7900 desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
7901 they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
7902 that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 € to buy
7903 software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
7904 networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
7905 not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
7906 already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
7907 if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
7908 that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
7909 plain criminal.</p>
7910
7911 <p>That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
7912 method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
7913 founded an association named
7914 <a href="https://www.teckids.org">Teckids</a> here in Germany that does
7915 just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
7916 area of free and open source software, for example the
7917 <a href="http://kids.froscon.org">FrogLabs</a>, which share staff with
7918 Teckids and are the youth programme of
7919 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">the Free and Open Source Software
7920 Conference (FrOSCon)</a>. We do a lot more than most other conferences
7921 - this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
7922 aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
7923 and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
7924 of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.</p>
7925
7926 <p>Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
7927 the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
7928 their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
7929 Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
7930 clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
7931 it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
7932 who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
7933 We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
7934 open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
7935 software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
7936 group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
7937 Skolelinux in the future ;)!</p>
7938
7939 <p>So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
7940 being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
7941 that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
7942 but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.</p>
7943
7944 <!--
7945
7946 >  * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
7947
7948 That's probably the hardest question of them all, as I do not know the
7949 community. However, I would be willing to do the following:
7950
7951  <li>Run an interview with a German headteacher who is very open to
7952    free software, and also prefers it, but cannot really use it because
7953    of the decision makers above;
7954  <li>Run interviews with some kids, both with and without previous
7955    knowledge about free software
7956
7957 If that is wanted, just let me know ;).
7958
7959 -->
7960
7961       </div>
7962       <div class="tags">
7963
7964
7965         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>.
7966
7967
7968       </div>
7969     </div>
7970     <div class="padding"></div>
7971
7972     <div class="entry">
7973       <div class="title">
7974         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html">Debian Edu interview: Klaus Knopper</a>
7975       </div>
7976       <div class="date">
7977          6th December 2013
7978       </div>
7979       <div class="body">
7980         <p>It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
7981 but the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
7982 Skolelinux</a> community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
7983 had a new school administrator show up on
7984 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a> to share
7985 his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school.  This
7986 time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
7987 Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
7988 Germany a few years ago.</p>
7989
7990 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
7991
7992 <p>I am Klaus Knopper.  I have a master degree in electrical
7993 engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
7994 the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
7995 freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.</p>
7996
7997 <p>All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
7998 from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental
7999 projects like the <a href="http://www.knoppix.org">Knoppix GNU/Linux live
8000 system</a> (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
8001 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html">ADRIANE</a>
8002 (a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
8003 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/linbo/index-en.html">LINBO</a>
8004 (Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
8005 system supporting various operating systems).</p>
8006
8007 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
8008 project?</strong></p>
8009
8010 <p>The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
8011 coordinator for Skolelinux.  We were looking for an all-in-one open
8012 source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
8013 introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.</p>
8014
8015 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
8016 Edu?</strong></p>
8017
8018 <ul>
8019   <li>Quick installation,</li>
8020   <li>works (almost) out of the box,</li>
8021   <li>contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,</li>
8022   <li>is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
8023     single company,</li>
8024   <li>has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
8025     experience and problem solutions.</li>
8026 </ul>
8027
8028 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
8029 Edu?</strong></p>
8030
8031 <ul>
8032   <li>Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
8033   the next version.  Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
8034   a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
8035   working again reliably.
8036
8037   <li>Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
8038   little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
8039   similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
8040   as their base.
8041
8042   <li>Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
8043   configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
8044   not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
8045   configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
8046   and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
8047   network configuration to make it "Skolelinux-compatible".
8048
8049   <li>Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
8050   contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
8051   distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
8052   Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
8053   future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
8054   schemes.</li>
8055
8056   <li>Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
8057   compared to Debian.</li>
8058
8059 </ul>
8060
8061 <p>For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
8062 rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
8063 Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
8064 upgradeable without reinstallation.</p>
8065
8066 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
8067
8068 <p>GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
8069 programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
8070 occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
8071 programming languages for teaching.</p>
8072
8073 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
8074 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
8075
8076 <p>Strong arguments are</p>
8077
8078 <ul>
8079
8080   <li>Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
8081     teaching and learning.</li>
8082
8083   <li>Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
8084     home, and at their working place without running into license or
8085     conversion problems.</li>
8086
8087   <li>Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
8088     than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
8089     customers to certain products.  But teachers need to teach
8090     science, not products.</li>
8091
8092   <li>If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
8093     would you need proprietary software for?</li>
8094
8095 </ul>
8096
8097       </div>
8098       <div class="tags">
8099
8100
8101         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>.
8102
8103
8104       </div>
8105     </div>
8106     <div class="padding"></div>
8107
8108     <div class="entry">
8109       <div class="title">
8110         <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>
8111       </div>
8112       <div class="date">
8113         30th November 2013
8114       </div>
8115       <div class="body">
8116         <p>If you want the ability to electronically communicate directly with
8117 your neighbors and friends using a network controlled by your peers in
8118 stead of centrally controlled by a few corporations, or would like to
8119 experiment with interesting network technology, the
8120 <a href="http://www.dugnadsnett.no/">Dugnasnett for alle i Oslo</a>
8121 might be project for you.  39 mesh nodes are currently being planned,
8122 in the freshly started initiative from NUUG and Hackeriet to create a
8123 wireless community network.  The work is inspired by
8124 <a href="http://freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a>,
8125 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan
8126 Network</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet">Roofnet</a>
8127 and other successful mesh networks around the globe.  Two days ago we
8128 held a workshop to try to get people started on setting up their own
8129 mesh node, and there we decided to create a new mailing list
8130 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/dugnadsnett">dugnadsnett
8131 (at) nuug.no</a> and IRC channel
8132 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#dugnadsnett.no">#dugnadsnett.no</a> to
8133 coordinate the work.  See also the NUUG blog post
8134 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/E_postliste_og_IRC_kanal_for_Dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">announcing
8135 the mailing list and IRC channel</a>.</p>
8136
8137       </div>
8138       <div class="tags">
8139
8140
8141         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>.
8142
8143
8144       </div>
8145     </div>
8146     <div class="padding"></div>
8147
8148     <div class="entry">
8149       <div class="title">
8150         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
8151       </div>
8152       <div class="date">
8153         24th November 2013
8154       </div>
8155       <div class="body">
8156         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
8157 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
8158 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
8159 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
8160 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
8161 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
8162 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
8163 is working on.  I checked the
8164 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
8165 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
8166 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
8167 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
8168 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
8169 These are the release notes:</p>
8170
8171 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
8172
8173 <ul>
8174
8175   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
8176    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
8177    up.</li>
8178
8179   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
8180
8181   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
8182    Matthias Klose.</li>
8183
8184   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
8185    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
8186
8187   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
8188    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
8189    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
8190
8191 </ul>
8192
8193 <p>You can
8194 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
8195 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
8196 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
8197 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
8198 include a testsuite check.</p>
8199
8200       </div>
8201       <div class="tags">
8202
8203
8204         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>.
8205
8206
8207       </div>
8208     </div>
8209     <div class="padding"></div>
8210
8211     <div class="entry">
8212       <div class="title">
8213         <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>
8214       </div>
8215       <div class="date">
8216         21st November 2013
8217       </div>
8218       <div class="body">
8219         <p>Drones, flying robots, are getting more and more popular.  The most
8220 know ones are the killer drones used by some government to murder
8221 people they do not like without giving them the chance of a fair
8222 trial, but the technology have many good uses too, from mapping and
8223 forest maintenance to photography and search and rescue.  I am sure it
8224 is just a question of time before "bad drones" are in the hands of
8225 private enterprises and not only state criminals but petty criminals
8226 too.  The drone technology is very useful and very dangerous.  To have
8227 some control over the use of drones, I agree with Daniel Suarez in his
8228 TED talk
8229 "<a href="https://archive.org/details/DanielSuarez_2013G">The kill
8230 decision shouldn't belong to a robot</a>", where he suggested this
8231 little gem to keep the good while limiting the bad use of drones:</p>
8232
8233 <blockquote>
8234
8235 <p>Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed
8236 I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement
8237 through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on
8238 aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to
8239 download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous
8240 vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and
8241 historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones
8242 to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their
8243 own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their
8244 presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic
8245 drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.</p>
8246
8247 <p>But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It
8248 would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles
8249 and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.</p>
8250
8251 </blockquote>
8252
8253 <p>The key is that <em>every citizen</em> should be able to read the
8254 radio beacons sent from the drones in the area, to be able to check
8255 both the government and others use of drones.  For such control to be
8256 effective, everyone must be able to do it.  What should such beacon
8257 contain?  At least formal owner, purpose, contact information and GPS
8258 location.  Probably also the origin and target position of the current
8259 flight.  And perhaps some registration number to be able to look up
8260 the drone in a central database tracking their movement.  Robots
8261 should not have privacy.  It is people who need privacy.</p>
8262
8263       </div>
8264       <div class="tags">
8265
8266
8267         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>.
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/Lets_make_a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo_.html">Lets make a wireless community network in Oslo!</a>
8277       </div>
8278       <div class="date">
8279         13th November 2013
8280       </div>
8281       <div class="body">
8282         <p>Today NUUG and Hackeriet announced
8283 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Bli_med___bygge_dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">our
8284 plans to join forces and create a wireless community network in
8285 Oslo</a>.  The workshop to help people get started will take place
8286 Thursday 2013-11-28, but we already are collecting the geolocation of
8287 people joining forces to make this happen.  We have
8288 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/oslo-nodes.geojson">9
8289 locations plotted on the map</a>, but we will need more before we have
8290 a connected mesh spread across Oslo.  If this sound interesting to
8291 you, please join us at the workshop.  If you are too impatient to wait
8292 15 days, please join us on the IRC channel
8293 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
8294 right away. :)</p>
8295
8296       </div>
8297       <div class="tags">
8298
8299
8300         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>.
8301
8302
8303       </div>
8304     </div>
8305     <div class="padding"></div>
8306
8307     <div class="entry">
8308       <div class="title">
8309         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
8310       </div>
8311       <div class="date">
8312         10th November 2013
8313       </div>
8314       <div class="body">
8315         <p>Continuing my research into mesh networking, I was recommended to
8316 use TP-Link 3040 and 3600 access points as mesh nodes, and the pair I
8317 bought arrived on Friday.  Here are my notes on how to set up the
8318 MR3040 as a mesh node using
8319 <a href="http://www.openwrt.org/">OpenWrt</a>.</p>
8320
8321 <p>I started by following the instructions on the OpenWRT wiki for
8322 <a href="http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3040">TL-MR3040</a>,
8323 and downloaded
8324 <a href="http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin">the
8325 recommended firmware image</a>
8326 (openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin) and
8327 uploaded it into the original web interface.  The flashing went fine,
8328 and the machine was available via telnet on the ethernet port.  After
8329 logging in and setting the root password, ssh was available and I
8330 could start to set it up as a batman-adv mesh node.</p>
8331
8332 <p>I started off by reading the instructions from
8333 <a href="http://wirelessafrica.meraka.org.za/wiki/index.php?title=Antoine's_Research">Wireless
8334 Africa</a>, which had quite a lot of useful information, but
8335 eventually I followed the recipe from the Open Mesh wiki for
8336 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Batman-adv-openwrt-config">using
8337 batman-adv on OpenWrt</a>.  A small snag was the fact that the
8338 <tt>opkg install kmod-batman-adv</tt> command did not work as it
8339 should.  The batman-adv kernel module would fail to load because its
8340 dependency crc16 was not already loaded.  I
8341 <a href="https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/14452">reported the bug</a> to
8342 the openwrt project and hope it will be fixed soon.  But the problem
8343 only seem to affect initial testing of batman-adv, as configuration
8344 seem to work when booting from scratch.</p>
8345
8346 <p>The setup is done using files in /etc/config/.  I did not bridge
8347 the Ethernet and mesh interfaces this time, to be able to hook up the
8348 box on my local network and log into it for configuration updates.
8349 The following files were changed and look like this after modifying
8350 them:</p>
8351
8352 <p><tt>/etc/config/network</tt></p>
8353
8354 <pre>
8355
8356 config interface 'loopback'
8357         option ifname 'lo'
8358         option proto 'static'
8359         option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
8360         option netmask '255.0.0.0'
8361
8362 config globals 'globals'
8363         option ula_prefix 'fdbf:4c12:3fed::/48'
8364
8365 config interface 'lan'
8366         option ifname 'eth0'
8367         option type 'bridge'
8368         option proto 'dhcp'
8369         option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
8370         option netmask '255.255.255.0'
8371         option hostname 'tl-mr3040'
8372         option ip6assign '60'
8373
8374 config interface 'mesh'
8375         option ifname 'adhoc0'
8376         option mtu '1528'
8377         option proto 'batadv'
8378         option mesh 'bat0'
8379 </pre>
8380
8381 <p><tt>/etc/config/wireless</tt></p>
8382 <pre>
8383
8384 config wifi-device 'radio0'
8385         option type 'mac80211'
8386         option channel '11'
8387         option hwmode '11ng'
8388         option path 'platform/ar933x_wmac'
8389         option htmode 'HT20'
8390         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-20'
8391         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-40'
8392         list ht_capab 'RX-STBC1'
8393         list ht_capab 'DSSS_CCK-40'
8394         option disabled '0'
8395
8396 config wifi-iface 'wmesh'
8397         option device 'radio0'
8398         option ifname 'adhoc0'
8399         option network 'mesh'
8400         option encryption 'none'
8401         option mode 'adhoc'
8402         option bssid '02:BA:00:00:00:01'
8403         option ssid 'meshfx@hackeriet'
8404 </pre>
8405 <p><tt>/etc/config/batman-adv</tt></p>
8406 <pre>
8407
8408 config 'mesh' 'bat0'
8409         option interfaces 'adhoc0'
8410         option 'aggregated_ogms'
8411         option 'ap_isolation'
8412         option 'bonding'
8413         option 'fragmentation'
8414         option 'gw_bandwidth'
8415         option 'gw_mode'
8416         option 'gw_sel_class'
8417         option 'log_level'
8418         option 'orig_interval'
8419         option 'vis_mode'
8420         option 'bridge_loop_avoidance'
8421         option 'distributed_arp_table'
8422         option 'network_coding'
8423         option 'hop_penalty'
8424
8425 # yet another batX instance
8426 # config 'mesh' 'bat5'
8427 #       option 'interfaces' 'second_mesh'
8428 </pre>
8429
8430 <p>The mesh node is now operational.  I have yet to test its range,
8431 but I hope it is good.  I have not yet tested the TP-Link 3600 box
8432 still wrapped up in plastic.</p>
8433
8434       </div>
8435       <div class="tags">
8436
8437
8438         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>.
8439
8440
8441       </div>
8442     </div>
8443     <div class="padding"></div>
8444
8445     <div class="entry">
8446       <div class="title">
8447         <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>
8448       </div>
8449       <div class="date">
8450          2nd November 2013
8451       </div>
8452       <div class="body">
8453         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
8454 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
8455 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
8456 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
8457 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
8458
8459 <p><pre>
8460 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
8461 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
8462 # Provides:          rsyslog
8463 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
8464 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
8465 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
8466 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
8467 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
8468 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
8469 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
8470 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
8471 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
8472 ### END INIT INFO
8473 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
8474 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
8475 </pre></p>
8476
8477 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
8478 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
8479 info/comments.</p>
8480
8481 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
8482 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
8483
8484 <p><pre>
8485 #!/bin/sh
8486
8487 # Define LSB log_* functions.
8488 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
8489 # and status_of_proc is working.
8490 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
8491
8492 #
8493 # Function that starts the daemon/service
8494
8495 #
8496 do_start()
8497 {
8498         # Return
8499         #   0 if daemon has been started
8500         #   1 if daemon was already running
8501         #   2 if daemon could not be started
8502         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
8503                 || return 1
8504         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
8505                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
8506                 || return 2
8507         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
8508         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
8509         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
8510 }
8511
8512 #
8513 # Function that stops the daemon/service
8514 #
8515 do_stop()
8516 {
8517         # Return
8518         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
8519         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
8520         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
8521         #   other if a failure occurred
8522         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
8523         RETVAL="$?"
8524         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
8525         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
8526         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
8527         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
8528         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
8529         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
8530         # sleep for some time.
8531         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
8532         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
8533         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
8534         rm -f $PIDFILE
8535         return "$RETVAL"
8536 }
8537
8538 #
8539 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
8540 #
8541 do_reload() {
8542         #
8543         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
8544         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
8545         # then implement that here.
8546         #
8547         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
8548         return 0
8549 }
8550
8551 SCRIPTNAME=$1
8552 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
8553 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
8554 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
8555     script="$1"
8556     shift
8557     . $script
8558 else
8559     exit 0
8560 fi
8561
8562 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
8563 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
8564
8565 # Exit if the package is not installed
8566 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
8567
8568 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
8569 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
8570
8571 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
8572 . /lib/init/vars.sh
8573
8574 case "$1" in
8575   start)
8576         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
8577         do_start
8578         case "$?" in
8579                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
8580                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
8581         esac
8582         ;;
8583   stop)
8584         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
8585         do_stop
8586         case "$?" in
8587                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
8588                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
8589         esac
8590         ;;
8591   status)
8592         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
8593         ;;
8594   #reload|force-reload)
8595         #
8596         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
8597         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
8598         #
8599         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
8600         #do_reload
8601         #log_end_msg $?
8602         #;;
8603   restart|force-reload)
8604         #
8605         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
8606         # 'force-reload' alias
8607         #
8608         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
8609         do_stop
8610         case "$?" in
8611           0|1)
8612                 do_start
8613                 case "$?" in
8614                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
8615                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
8616                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
8617                 esac
8618                 ;;
8619           *)
8620                 # Failed to stop
8621                 log_end_msg 1
8622                 ;;
8623         esac
8624         ;;
8625   *)
8626         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
8627         exit 3
8628         ;;
8629 esac
8630
8631 :
8632 </pre></p>
8633
8634 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
8635 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
8636 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
8637 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
8638
8639 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
8640 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
8641 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
8642 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
8643 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
8644
8645       </div>
8646       <div class="tags">
8647
8648
8649         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>.
8650
8651
8652       </div>
8653     </div>
8654     <div class="padding"></div>
8655
8656     <div class="entry">
8657       <div class="title">
8658         <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>
8659       </div>
8660       <div class="date">
8661          1st November 2013
8662       </div>
8663       <div class="body">
8664         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
8665 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
8666 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
8667 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
8668 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
8669 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
8670 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
8671 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
8672 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
8673 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
8674 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
8675 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
8676
8677 <p>The source is now available from
8678 <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>
8679
8680       </div>
8681       <div class="tags">
8682
8683
8684         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>.
8685
8686
8687       </div>
8688     </div>
8689     <div class="padding"></div>
8690
8691     <div class="entry">
8692       <div class="title">
8693         <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>
8694       </div>
8695       <div class="date">
8696         27th October 2013
8697       </div>
8698       <div class="body">
8699         <p>The
8700 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
8701 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
8702 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
8703 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
8704 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
8705 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
8706 of a plan to simplify the build system for
8707 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
8708 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
8709 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
8710 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
8711 Raspberry Pi.</p>
8712
8713 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
8714 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
8715 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
8716 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
8717 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
8718 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
8719 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
8720 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
8721 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
8722 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
8723 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
8724 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
8725 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
8726 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
8727 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
8728 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
8729 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
8730 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
8731 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
8732 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
8733 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
8734 available from
8735 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
8736 upstream project page</a>.</p>
8737
8738 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
8739 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
8740 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
8741 list:</p>
8742
8743 <p><pre>
8744 #!/bin/sh
8745 set -e # Exit on first error
8746 rootdir="$1"
8747 cd "$rootdir"
8748 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
8749 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
8750 EOF
8751 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
8752 # install a kernel somewhere too.
8753 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
8754     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
8755 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
8756 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
8757 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
8758 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
8759 </pre></p>
8760
8761 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
8762 to build the image:</p>
8763
8764 <pre>
8765 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
8766     --variant minbase \
8767     --arch armel \
8768     --distribution jessie \
8769     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
8770     --image test.img \
8771     --size 600M \
8772     --bootsize 64M \
8773     --boottype vfat \
8774     --log-level debug \
8775     --verbose \
8776     --no-kernel \
8777     --no-extlinux \
8778     --root-password raspberry \
8779     --hostname raspberrypi \
8780     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
8781     --customize `pwd`/customize \
8782     --package netbase \
8783     --package git-core \
8784     --package binutils \
8785     --package ca-certificates \
8786     --package wget \
8787     --package kmod
8788 </pre></p>
8789
8790 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
8791 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
8792 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
8793 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
8794 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
8795 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
8796 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
8797
8798 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
8799 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
8800 build dependency list.</p>
8801
8802 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
8803 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
8804 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
8805 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
8806
8807       </div>
8808       <div class="tags">
8809
8810
8811         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>.
8812
8813
8814       </div>
8815     </div>
8816     <div class="padding"></div>
8817
8818     <div class="entry">
8819       <div class="title">
8820         <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>
8821       </div>
8822       <div class="date">
8823         21st October 2013
8824       </div>
8825       <div class="body">
8826         <p>The last few days I have been experimenting with
8827 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki">the
8828 batman-adv mesh technology</a>.  I want to gain some experience to see
8829 if it will fit <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the
8830 Freedombox project</a>, and together with my neighbors try to build a
8831 mesh network around the park where I live.  Batman-adv is a layer 2
8832 mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear
8833 as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.</p>
8834
8835 <p>My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
8836 around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv.  So
8837 instead, I started playing with a
8838 <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/">Raspberry Pi</a>, and tried to
8839 get it working as a mesh node.  My idea is to use it to create a mesh
8840 node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
8841 the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
8842 network.  This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
8843 WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
8844 non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh.  This in turn is useful for
8845 Android phones using <a href="http://servalproject.org/">the Serval
8846 Project</a> voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
8847 phone and message each other for free.  The reason is that Android
8848 phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
8849 the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted.  But if
8850 they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
8851 every client on the local network.</p>
8852
8853 <p>To get this working, I've created a debian package
8854 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node">meshfx-node</a>
8855 and a script
8856 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/build-rpi-mesh-node">build-rpi-mesh-node</a>
8857 to create the Raspberry Pi boot image.  I'm using Debian Jessie (and
8858 not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
8859 Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
8860 image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now.  Also, as
8861 Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
8862 Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit.  I hope
8863 the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
8864 support.</p>
8865
8866 <p>To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
8867 after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:</p>
8868
8869 <p><pre>
8870 % wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
8871     https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
8872 % sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node > build.log 2>&1
8873 % dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
8874 %
8875 </pre></p>
8876
8877 <p>Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
8878 wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node.  At least it does for
8879 me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
8880 ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
8881 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">an
8882 earlier blog post about this mesh testing</a>.</p>
8883
8884 <p>The mesh node was not horribly expensive either.  I bought
8885 everything over the counter in shops nearby.  If I had ordered online
8886 from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:</p>
8887
8888 <p><table>
8889
8890 <tr><th>Supplier</th><th>Model</th><th>NOK</th></tr>
8891 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi model B</td><td>349.90</td></tr>
8892 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi type B case</td><td>99.90</td></tr>
8893 <tr><td>Lefdal</td><td>Jensen Air:Link 25150</td><td>295.-</td></tr>
8894 <tr><td>Clas Ohlson</td><td>Kingston 16 GB SD card</td><td>199.-</td></tr>
8895 <tr><td>Total cost</td><td></td><td>943.80</td></tr>
8896
8897 </table></p>
8898
8899 <p>Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
8900 connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the 1th
8901 floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
8902 play-node I use to develop the image building script.  And some times
8903 I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it.  I look forward
8904 to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
8905 and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)</p>
8906
8907       </div>
8908       <div class="tags">
8909
8910
8911         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>.
8912
8913
8914       </div>
8915     </div>
8916     <div class="padding"></div>
8917
8918     <div class="entry">
8919       <div class="title">
8920         <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>
8921       </div>
8922       <div class="date">
8923         19th October 2013
8924       </div>
8925       <div class="body">
8926         <p>Back in 2010, I created a Perl library to talk to
8927 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spykee">the Spykee robot</a>
8928 (with two belts, wifi, USB and Linux) and made it available from my
8929 web page.  Today I concluded that it should move to a site that is
8930 easier to use to cooperate with others, and moved it to github.  If
8931 you got a Spykee robot, you might want to check out
8932 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/libspykee-perl">the
8933 libspykee-perl github repository</a>.</p>
8934
8935       </div>
8936       <div class="tags">
8937
8938
8939         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>.
8940
8941
8942       </div>
8943     </div>
8944     <div class="padding"></div>
8945
8946     <div class="entry">
8947       <div class="title">
8948         <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>
8949       </div>
8950       <div class="date">
8951         15th October 2013
8952       </div>
8953       <div class="body">
8954         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
8955 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
8956 these. :)</p>
8957
8958 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
8959 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
8960 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
8961 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
8962 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
8963 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
8964 hope you will to. :)</p>
8965
8966 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
8967 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
8968 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
8969 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
8970 donated.  Are you next?</p>
8971
8972 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
8973 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
8974 statement under the heading
8975 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
8976 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
8977 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
8978 too.</p>
8979
8980       </div>
8981       <div class="tags">
8982
8983
8984         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>.
8985
8986
8987       </div>
8988     </div>
8989     <div class="padding"></div>
8990
8991     <div class="entry">
8992       <div class="title">
8993         <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>
8994       </div>
8995       <div class="date">
8996         11th October 2013
8997       </div>
8998       <div class="body">
8999         <p>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
9000 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
9001 areas, depending on the radio technology used.  Normal wifi equipment
9002 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
9003 successful examples like
9004 <a href="http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a> and
9005 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network</a>
9006 (see
9007 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
9008 for a large list</a>) around the globe.  To give you an idea how it
9009 work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
9010 can be seen from their
9011 <a href="http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
9012 updated node graph and map</a>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
9013 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
9014 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
9015 and that is the main topic of this blog post.</p>
9016
9017 <p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
9018 to do it as part of my involvement with the <a
9019 href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation</a> community, and
9020 my recent involvement in
9021 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project</a>
9022 finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
9023 Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
9024 when possible, given that most communication between people are
9025 between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
9026 communication patterns).  It also allow people to communicate without
9027 any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
9028 private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
9029 important over the years.</p>
9030
9031 <p>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
9032 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
9033 <a href="http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet</a> at Husmania.  They seem to
9034 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
9035 <a href="http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
9036 Freifunk project</a>, but that effort is now dead and the people
9037 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
9038 <a href="http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx</a>.  Unfortunately the wiki
9039 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
9040 reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
9041 the new project.  A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
9042 from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks.  I
9043 came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
9044 speakers about this talk (from
9045 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY">youtube</a>):</p>
9046
9047 <p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
9048
9049 <p>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
9050 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
9051 figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
9052 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
9053 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
9054 completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
9055 batman-adv for now.  It sure help me to  know that the very cool
9056 <a href="http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia</a>
9057 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
9058 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
9059 less industrialized communities.  Check out this cool video presenting
9060 that project (from
9061 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30qNfzJCQOA">youtube</a>):</p>
9062
9063 <p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
9064
9065 <p>According to the wikipedia page on
9066 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
9067 mesh network</a> there are around 70 competing schemes for routing
9068 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
9069 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
9070 based community mesh networks.</p>
9071
9072 <p>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2
9073 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
9074 network.  One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
9075 vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
9076 computer.  The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
9077 least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up.  A
9078 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
9079 introduction</a> is available from the Open Mesh project.  These are
9080 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:</p>
9081
9082 <p><table>
9083 <tr><th>Setting</th><th>Value</th></tr>
9084 <tr><td>Protocol / kernel module</td><td>batman-adv</td></tr>
9085 <tr><td>ESSID</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet</td></tr>
9086 <td>Channel / Frequency</td><td>11 / 2462</td></tr>
9087 <td>Cell ID</td><td>02:BA:00:00:00:01</td>
9088 </table></p>
9089
9090 <p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
9091 in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers.  (See a nice post from
9092 VillageTelco about
9093 "<a href="http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
9094 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!</a>
9095 for details.)  When these settings are activated and you have some
9096 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
9097 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
9098 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)</p>
9099
9100 <p>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
9101 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
9102 firmware supporting batman-adv.  If anyone know how to use that old
9103 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.</p>
9104
9105 <p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
9106 us on IRC, either channel
9107 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace</a>
9108 or <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug</a> on
9109 irc.freenode.net.</p>
9110
9111 <p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
9112 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
9113 and Innovation called
9114 <a href="http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
9115 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks</a> and elsewhere
9116 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
9117 Grünerløkka in Oslo.  So mesh networks are also interesting for
9118 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
9119 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
9120 know have closed down the experiment.  Perhaps Telenor or others would
9121 be interested in a cooperation?</p>
9122
9123 <p><strong>Update 2013-10-12</strong>: I was just
9124 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2013-October/005900.html">told
9125 by the Serval project developers</a> that they no longer use
9126 batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
9127 mesh system.</p>
9128
9129       </div>
9130       <div class="tags">
9131
9132
9133         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>.
9134
9135
9136       </div>
9137     </div>
9138     <div class="padding"></div>
9139
9140     <div class="entry">
9141       <div class="title">
9142         <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>
9143       </div>
9144       <div class="date">
9145          8th October 2013
9146       </div>
9147       <div class="body">
9148         <p>The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
9149 Salvador had published a
9150 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GgpdqgLFc">video on
9151 Youtube</a> showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
9152 Skolelinux profile.  This is the profile intended for use at home or
9153 on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
9154 services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
9155 in other word a single user machine).  The result is 11 minutes long,
9156 and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
9157 Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
9158 showing the <a href="http://www.zygotebody.com/">Zygote Body 3D model
9159 of the human body</a>, but I guess he did not know about those or find
9160 other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
9161 advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
9162 Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
9163 computers without hard drives by installing one central
9164 <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP server</a>.</p>
9165
9166 <p>Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:</p>
9167
9168 <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-GgpdqgLFc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
9169
9170 <p>Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux?  Please let
9171 me know. :)</p>
9172
9173       </div>
9174       <div class="tags">
9175
9176
9177         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>.
9178
9179
9180       </div>
9181     </div>
9182     <div class="padding"></div>
9183
9184     <div class="entry">
9185       <div class="title">
9186         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html">Finally, Debian Edu Wheezy is released today!</a>
9187       </div>
9188       <div class="date">
9189         29th September 2013
9190       </div>
9191       <div class="body">
9192         <p>A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
9193 Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team.  The
9194 complete announcement text can be found at
9195 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130928">the Debian News
9196 section</a>, translated to several languages.  Please check it out.</p>
9197
9198 <p>There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon.  One
9199 can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
9200 partition is too small.  A workaround is to extend the partition (use
9201 lvresize + resize2fs in tty 2 while installing).</p>
9202
9203       </div>
9204       <div class="tags">
9205
9206
9207         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>.
9208
9209
9210       </div>
9211     </div>
9212     <div class="padding"></div>
9213
9214     <div class="entry">
9215       <div class="title">
9216         <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>
9217       </div>
9218       <div class="date">
9219         27th September 2013
9220       </div>
9221       <div class="body">
9222         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
9223 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
9224 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
9225 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
9226
9227 <ul>
9228
9229 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
9230 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
9231
9232 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
9233 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
9234
9235 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
9236 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
9237 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
9238 (Youtube)</li>
9239
9240 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
9241 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
9242
9243 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
9244 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
9245
9246 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
9247 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
9248 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
9249
9250 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
9251 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
9252 (Youtube)</li>
9253
9254 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
9255 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
9256
9257 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
9258 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
9259
9260 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
9261 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
9262 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
9263
9264 </ul>
9265
9266 <p>A larger list is available from
9267 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
9268 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
9269
9270 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
9271 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
9272 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
9273 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
9274 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
9275 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
9276 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
9277 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
9278 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
9279 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
9280 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
9281
9282       </div>
9283       <div class="tags">
9284
9285
9286         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>.
9287
9288
9289       </div>
9290     </div>
9291     <div class="padding"></div>
9292
9293     <div class="entry">
9294       <div class="title">
9295         <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>
9296       </div>
9297       <div class="date">
9298         16th September 2013
9299       </div>
9300       <div class="body">
9301         <p>The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
9302 today.  This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:</p>
9303
9304 <blockquote>
9305 <p>Hi,</p>
9306
9307 <p>it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta 2 for
9308 short) of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
9309 Skolelinux</a> based on Debian Wheezy!</p>
9310
9311 <p>Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
9312 we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
9313 weekend.  We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
9314 if you find something, please notify us immediately!</p>
9315
9316 <p>(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
9317 another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)</p>
9318
9319 <p>Noteworthy changes and software updates for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b2
9320 compared to beta1:</p>
9321
9322 <ul>
9323
9324 <li>The KDE proxy setup has been adjusted to use the provided wpad.dat. This
9325 also gets Chromium to use this proxy.</li>
9326 <li>Install kdepim-groupware with KDE desktops to make sure korganizer
9327 understand ical/dav sources.</li>
9328 <li>Increased default maximum size of /var/spool/squid and /skole/backup on the
9329 main server.</li>
9330 <li>A source DVD image containing all source packages is now available as well.</li>
9331 <li>Updates for chromium (29.0.1547.57-1~deb7u1), imagemagick
9332 (6.7.7.10-5+deb7u2), php5 (5.4.4-14+deb7u4), libmodplug
9333 (0.8.8.4-3+deb7u1+git20130828), tiff (4.0.2-6+deb7u2), linux-image
9334 (3.2.0-4-486_3.2.46-1+deb7u1).</li>
9335
9336 </ul>
9337
9338 <p>Where to get it:</p>
9339
9340 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
9341
9342 <ul>
9343 <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>
9344 <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>
9345 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso .</li>
9346 </ul>
9347
9348 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is:  3a1c89f4666df80eebcd46c5bf5fedb866f9472f</p>
9349
9350 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
9351 <ul>
9352 <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>
9353 <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>
9354 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso .</li>
9355 </ul>
9356
9357 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 702d1718548f401c74bfa6df9f032cc3ee16597e</p>
9358
9359 <p>The Source DVD image has the filename
9360 debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-source-DVD.iso and the SHA1SUM
9361 089eed8b3f962db47aae1f6a9685e9bb2fa30ca5 and is available the same way
9362 as the other isos.</p>
9363
9364 <p>How to report bugs</p>
9365
9366 <p>For information how to report bugs please see
9367 <br><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
9368
9369
9370 <p>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</p>
9371
9372 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
9373 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
9374 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
9375 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
9376 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
9377 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
9378 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
9379 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
9380 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
9381 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
9382 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
9383 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
9384 can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
9385
9386 <p>This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
9387 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
9388 Squeeze release.</p>
9389
9390 <p>Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases</p>
9391
9392 <p>Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
9393 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
9394 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
9395 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
9396 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2)
9397 Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
9398 password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
9399 (backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
9400 to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
9401 directory.</p>
9402
9403
9404 <p>cheers,
9405 <br>        Holger</p>
9406 </blockquote>
9407
9408       </div>
9409       <div class="tags">
9410
9411
9412         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>.
9413
9414
9415       </div>
9416     </div>
9417     <div class="padding"></div>
9418
9419     <div class="entry">
9420       <div class="title">
9421         <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>
9422       </div>
9423       <div class="date">
9424         10th September 2013
9425       </div>
9426       <div class="body">
9427         <p>I was introduced to the
9428 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
9429 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
9430 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
9431 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
9432 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
9433 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
9434 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
9435 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
9436
9437 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
9438 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
9439 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
9440 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
9441 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
9442
9443 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
9444 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
9445 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
9446 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
9447 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
9448 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
9449 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
9450 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
9451 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
9452 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
9453 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
9454 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
9455 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
9456 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
9457 missing in Debian).</p>
9458
9459 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
9460 scripts
9461 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
9462 and a administrative web interface
9463 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
9464 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
9465 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
9466 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
9467 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
9468 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
9469 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
9470 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
9471 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
9472 this is really working yet, see
9473 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
9474 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
9475 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
9476 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
9477 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
9478 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
9479 with lots of half baked features.</p>
9480
9481 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
9482 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
9483 at.</p>
9484
9485 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
9486
9487 <ol>
9488
9489 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
9490 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
9491 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
9492 to the Debian installer:<p>
9493 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
9494
9495 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
9496 install on.</li>
9497
9498 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
9499 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
9500
9501 </ol>
9502
9503 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
9504
9505 <ol>
9506
9507 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
9508 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
9509 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
9510 <pre>
9511 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
9512 </pre></li>
9513 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
9514 <pre>
9515 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
9516    apt-key add -
9517 apt-get update
9518 apt-get install freedombox-setup
9519 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
9520 </pre></li>
9521 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
9522
9523 </ol>
9524
9525 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
9526 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
9527 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
9528 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
9529 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
9530
9531 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
9532 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
9533 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
9534 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
9535
9536 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
9537 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
9538 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
9539 irc.debian.org and the
9540 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
9541 mailing list</a>.</p>
9542
9543 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
9544 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
9545 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
9546 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
9547 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
9548 default password is 'secret'.</p>
9549
9550       </div>
9551       <div class="tags">
9552
9553
9554         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>.
9555
9556
9557       </div>
9558     </div>
9559     <div class="padding"></div>
9560
9561     <div class="entry">
9562       <div class="title">
9563         <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>
9564       </div>
9565       <div class="date">
9566         22nd August 2013
9567       </div>
9568       <div class="body">
9569         <p>The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
9570 today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows
9571 integration fixes .  This is the release announcement:</p>
9572
9573 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b1 released 2013-08-22</strong></p>
9574
9575 <p>These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
9576 7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
9577
9578 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
9579
9580 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
9581 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
9582 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
9583 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
9584 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
9585 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
9586 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
9587 the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be
9588 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
9589 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
9590 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
9591 desktop contains
9592 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
9593 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
9594 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
9595 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
9596
9597 <p>This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this
9598 is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze
9599 release.</p>
9600
9601 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
9602 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
9603 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
9604 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
9605 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined
9606 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/08/msg00127.html">on
9607 the mailing list</a>. (2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and
9608 replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password
9609 hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user
9610 need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for
9611 CIFS access to their home directory.</p>
9612
9613 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
9614
9615 <ul>
9616
9617 <li>Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh
9618     work also without a attached tty.</li>
9619 <li>Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to
9620     make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line
9621     tools. Please note, that the command 'update-command-not-found'
9622     has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access
9623     required).</li>
9624
9625 </ul>
9626
9627 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
9628
9629 <ul>
9630
9631 <li>Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool
9632 needed for desktop=xfce installations.</li>
9633 <li>Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB
9634 stick ISO image.</li>
9635 <li>Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).</li>
9636 <li>Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.</li>
9637 <li>Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens
9638     during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to
9639     cope with this.</li>
9640 <li>Make Samba passwords changeable (again) via GOsa².</li>
9641 <li>Fix generation of LM and NT password hashes via GOsa² to avoid
9642     empty password hashes.</li>
9643 <li>Adapted Samba machine domain joining to latest change in the
9644     smbldap-tools Perl package, fixing bugs blocking Windows machines
9645     from joining the Samba domain.</li>
9646
9647 </ul>
9648
9649 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
9650
9651 <ul>
9652
9653 <li>KDE fails to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
9654     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
9655 <li>Chromium also fails to use the proxy when using the KDE desktop
9656     (using the KDE configuration).</li>
9657
9658 </ul>
9659
9660 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
9661
9662 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
9663
9664 <ul>
9665
9666 <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>
9667
9668 <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>
9669
9670 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso .</li>
9671
9672 </ul>
9673
9674 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 1e357f80b55e703523f2254adde6d78b
9675 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 7157f9be5fd27c7694d713c6ecfed61c3edda3b2</p>
9676
9677 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
9678
9679 <ul>
9680
9681 <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>
9682 <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>
9683 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso .</li>
9684
9685 </ul>
9686
9687 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 7a8408ead59cf7e3cef25afb6e91590b
9688 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: f1817c031f02790d5edb3bfa0dcf8451088ad119</p>
9689
9690
9691 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
9692
9693 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
9694
9695       </div>
9696       <div class="tags">
9697
9698
9699         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>.
9700
9701
9702       </div>
9703     </div>
9704     <div class="padding"></div>
9705
9706     <div class="entry">
9707       <div class="title">
9708         <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>
9709       </div>
9710       <div class="date">
9711         18th August 2013
9712       </div>
9713       <div class="body">
9714         <p>Earlier, I reported about
9715 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
9716 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
9717 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
9718 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
9719 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
9720 currently on the disk.</p>
9721
9722 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
9723 <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>
9724 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
9725 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
9726 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
9727 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
9728 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
9729 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
9730 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
9731 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
9732 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
9733 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
9734 the broken disks.</p>
9735
9736       </div>
9737       <div class="tags">
9738
9739
9740         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>.
9741
9742
9743       </div>
9744     </div>
9745     <div class="padding"></div>
9746
9747     <div class="entry">
9748       <div class="title">
9749         <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>
9750       </div>
9751       <div class="date">
9752          2nd August 2013
9753       </div>
9754       <div class="body">
9755         <p>It has been a while since my last update.  Since last summer, I
9756 have worked on a Norwegian
9757 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
9758 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
9759 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright
9760 law.  Yesterday, I finally broken the 90% mark, when counting the
9761 number of strings to translate.  Due to real life constraints, I have
9762 not had time to work on it since March, but when the summer broke out,
9763 I found time to work on it again.  Still lots of work left, but the
9764 first draft is nearing completion.  I created a graph to show the
9765 progress of the translation:</p>
9766
9767 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
9768
9769 <p>When the first draft is done, the translated text need to be
9770 proof read, and the remaining formatting problems with images and SVG
9771 drawings need to be fixed.  There are probably also some index entries
9772 missing that need to be added.  This can be done by comparing the
9773 index entries listed in the SiSU version of the book, or comparing the
9774 English docbook version with the paper version.  Last, the colophon
9775 page with ISBN numbers etc need to be wrapped up before the release is
9776 done.  I should also figure out how to get correct Norwegian sorting
9777 of the index pages.  All docbook tools I have tried so far (xmlto,
9778 docbook-xsl, dblatex) get the order of symbols and the special
9779 Norwegian letters ÆØÅ wrong.</p>
9780
9781 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
9782 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
9783 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
9784 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
9785 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
9786 around?  There are also some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me.
9787 If you want to help, please get in touch with me, and check out the
9788 project files currently available from
9789 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
9790
9791 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
9792 the updated
9793 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
9794 and
9795 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
9796 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
9797 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
9798 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
9799
9800       </div>
9801       <div class="tags">
9802
9803
9804         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>.
9805
9806
9807       </div>
9808     </div>
9809     <div class="padding"></div>
9810
9811     <div class="entry">
9812       <div class="title">
9813         <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>
9814       </div>
9815       <div class="date">
9816         27th July 2013
9817       </div>
9818       <div class="body">
9819         <p>The first wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
9820 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
9821
9822 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b0 released
9823 2013-07-27</strong></p>
9824
9825 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
9826 7.1+edu0~b0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
9827
9828 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
9829
9830 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
9831 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
9832 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
9833 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
9834 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
9835 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
9836 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
9837 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
9838 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
9839 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
9840 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
9841 desktop contains
9842 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
9843 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
9844 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
9845 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
9846
9847 <p>This is the fifth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
9848 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
9849 Squeeze release.</p>
9850
9851 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
9852 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
9853 release.</p>
9854
9855 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
9856
9857 <ul>
9858
9859 <li>Switched roaming workstation profiles from wicd to network-manager
9860    for network configuration, as wicd didn't work any more.</li>
9861 <li>Changed version numbers of patched gosa and libpam-mklocaluser
9862    packages to make sure our locally patched versions will be replaced
9863    by the official packages when they are released from Debian. Those
9864    installing alpha version need to reinstall or manually downgrade gosa
9865    and libpam-mklocaluser.</li>
9866 <li>Added bluetooth tools to the default desktop (bluedevil, blueman).</li>
9867 <li>Added tools for sharing the desktop on KDE (krdc, krfb).</li>
9868 <li>Added valgrind to the default installation for easier debugging of
9869    crash bugs.</li>
9870
9871 </ul>
9872
9873 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
9874
9875 <ul>
9876
9877 <li>Fixed artwork package to work with gnome, no longer break
9878    desktop=gnome installations.</li>
9879 <li>Adjusted installer to now work when forced to use a proxy with the
9880    netinst CD.</li>
9881 <li>Fixed code detecting and setting/loading hardware specific
9882    setup/firmware to work more robust out of the box.</li>
9883 <li>Adjusted Kerberos setup to detect realm and server settings at
9884    install time instead of dynamically at run time. This avoid a crash
9885    with krb5-auth-dialog on diskless workstations without a DNS name.</li>
9886 <li>Worked around misfeature in network-manager not calling the dhclient
9887    exit hooks, causing automatic proxy configuration and automatic host
9888    name setting at run time to work again.</li>
9889 <li>Fixed feature setting the default Iceweasel start page from URL
9890    fetched from LDAP, to allow schools to set the global default by
9891    updating the dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no LDAP object.</li>
9892 <li>Changed default host name on all networked machines to be unique
9893    (generated from MAC or reverse DNS) after boot.</li>
9894 <li>Adjusted partition sizes to make sure they are big enough.</li>
9895
9896 </ul>
9897
9898 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
9899
9900 <ul>
9901
9902 <li>Grub is missing the new artwork.</li>
9903 <li>KDE fail to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
9904     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
9905 <li>Chromium also fail to use the proxy.</li>
9906
9907 </ul>
9908
9909 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
9910
9911 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
9912
9913 <ul>
9914
9915 <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>
9916
9917 <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>
9918
9919 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso .</li>
9920
9921 </ul>
9922
9923 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 55d5de9765b6dccd5d9ec33cf1a07109
9924 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 996a1d9517740e4d627d100de2d12b23dd545a3f</p>
9925
9926 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
9927
9928 <ul>
9929
9930 <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>
9931 <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>
9932 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso .</li>
9933
9934 </ul>
9935
9936 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: d8f0818c51a78d357de794066f289f69
9937 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 49185ca354e8d0543240423746924f76a6cee733</p>
9938
9939
9940 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
9941
9942 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
9943
9944       </div>
9945       <div class="tags">
9946
9947
9948         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>.
9949
9950
9951       </div>
9952     </div>
9953     <div class="padding"></div>
9954
9955     <div class="entry">
9956       <div class="title">
9957         <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>
9958       </div>
9959       <div class="date">
9960         17th July 2013
9961       </div>
9962       <div class="body">
9963         <p>Today I switched to
9964 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
9965 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
9966 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
9967 <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
9968 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
9969 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
9970 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
9971 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
9972 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
9973 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
9974 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
9975 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
9976 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
9977 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
9978 station from now on.</p>
9979
9980 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
9981 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
9982 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
9983 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
9984 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
9985 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
9986 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
9987 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
9988 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
9989 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
9990 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
9991 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
9992
9993 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
9994 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
9995 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
9996 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
9997 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
9998 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
9999 parameters are tuned:</p>
10000
10001 <ul>
10002
10003 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
10004     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
10005
10006 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
10007     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
10008     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
10009
10010 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
10011     systems.</li>
10012
10013 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
10014     /etc/fstab.</li>
10015
10016 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
10017
10018 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
10019     cron.daily).</li>
10020
10021 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
10022     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
10023
10024 </ul>
10025
10026 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
10027 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
10028 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
10029 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
10030 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
10031 from getting the data on the disk (see
10032 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
10033 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
10034 right thing to do.</p>
10035
10036 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
10037 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
10038 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
10039
10040 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
10041 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
10042 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
10043 instead of during my work.</p>
10044
10045 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
10046 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
10047
10048 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
10049 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
10050 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
10051
10052 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
10053 there.</p>
10054
10055 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
10056 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
10057 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
10058 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
10059 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
10060 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
10061 back.</p>
10062
10063       </div>
10064       <div class="tags">
10065
10066
10067         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>.
10068
10069
10070       </div>
10071     </div>
10072     <div class="padding"></div>
10073
10074     <div class="entry">
10075       <div class="title">
10076         <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>
10077       </div>
10078       <div class="date">
10079         10th July 2013
10080       </div>
10081       <div class="body">
10082         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
10083 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
10084 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
10085 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
10086 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
10087 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
10088 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
10089 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
10090
10091 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
10092 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
10093 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
10094 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
10095 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
10096 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
10097 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
10098 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
10099 lock up when I download a new
10100 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
10101 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
10102 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
10103
10104 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
10105 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
10106 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
10107 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
10108 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
10109 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
10110
10111 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
10112 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
10113 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
10114 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
10115 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
10116 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
10117
10118 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
10119 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
10120 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
10121 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
10122 exist).</p>
10123
10124       </div>
10125       <div class="tags">
10126
10127
10128         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>.
10129
10130
10131       </div>
10132     </div>
10133     <div class="padding"></div>
10134
10135     <div class="entry">
10136       <div class="title">
10137         <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>
10138       </div>
10139       <div class="date">
10140          9th July 2013
10141       </div>
10142       <div class="body">
10143         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
10144 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
10145 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
10146 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
10147 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
10148 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
10149 Bitraf</a>.</p>
10150
10151 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
10152 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
10153 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
10154 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
10155 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
10156
10157       </div>
10158       <div class="tags">
10159
10160
10161         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>.
10162
10163
10164       </div>
10165     </div>
10166     <div class="padding"></div>
10167
10168     <div class="entry">
10169       <div class="title">
10170         <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>
10171       </div>
10172       <div class="date">
10173          5th July 2013
10174       </div>
10175       <div class="body">
10176         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
10177 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
10178 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
10179 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
10180 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
10181 ended up picking a
10182 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
10183 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
10184 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
10185 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
10186 on that below.</p>
10187
10188 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
10189 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
10190 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
10191 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
10192 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
10193 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
10194 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
10195 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
10196 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
10197
10198 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
10199 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
10200 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
10201 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
10202 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
10203 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
10204 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
10205
10206 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
10207 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
10208
10209 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
10210 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
10211 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
10212 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
10213 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
10214 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
10215 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
10216 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
10217 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
10218 kernel developers as
10219 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
10220 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
10221 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
10222 Lenovo forums, both for
10223 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
10224 2012-11-10</a> and for
10225 <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
10226 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
10227 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
10228 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
10229 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
10230 There is even a
10231 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
10232 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
10233 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
10234
10235 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
10236 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
10237 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
10238 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
10239 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
10240 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
10241 fixed. :)</p>
10242
10243       </div>
10244       <div class="tags">
10245
10246
10247         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>.
10248
10249
10250       </div>
10251     </div>
10252     <div class="padding"></div>
10253
10254     <div class="entry">
10255       <div class="title">
10256         <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>
10257       </div>
10258       <div class="date">
10259          4th July 2013
10260       </div>
10261       <div class="body">
10262         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
10263 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
10264 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
10265 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
10266 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
10267 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
10268 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
10269 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
10270 with an expencive door stop.</p>
10271
10272 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
10273 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
10274 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
10275 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
10276 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
10277 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
10278 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
10279
10280 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
10281 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
10282 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
10283 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
10284 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
10285 new laptop now. :)</p>
10286
10287 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
10288
10289       </div>
10290       <div class="tags">
10291
10292
10293         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>.
10294
10295
10296       </div>
10297     </div>
10298     <div class="padding"></div>
10299
10300     <div class="entry">
10301       <div class="title">
10302         <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>
10303       </div>
10304       <div class="date">
10305          3rd July 2013
10306       </div>
10307       <div class="body">
10308         <p>The fourth wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
10309 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
10310
10311 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~alpha3 released
10312 2013-07-03</strong></p>
10313
10314 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
10315 7.1+edu0~alpha3, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
10316
10317 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
10318
10319 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
10320 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
10321 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
10322 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
10323 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
10324 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
10325 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
10326 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
10327 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
10328 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
10329 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
10330 desktop contains
10331 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
10332 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
10333 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
10334 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
10335
10336 <p>This is the fourth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
10337 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
10338 Squeeze release.</p>
10339
10340 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
10341 <ul>
10342   <li>Dropped ispell dictionaries from our default installation.</li>
10343   <li>Dropped menu-xdg from the KDE desktop option, to drop the Debian
10344     submenu.  It was not included with Gnome, LXDE or Xfce, so this
10345     brings KDE in line with the others.</li>
10346   <li>Dropped xdrawchem, xjig and xsok from our default installation as
10347     they don't have a desktop menu entry and thus won't show up in the
10348     menu now that menu-xdg was removed.</li>
10349   <li>Removed the killer system to kill left behind processes on
10350     multi-user machines, as it was no longer able to understand when a
10351     X display was in use and killed the processes of the active users
10352     too.</li>
10353   <li>Dropped the golearn (from goplay) package as the debtags in wheezy
10354     are too few to make the package useful.</li>
10355 </ul>
10356 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
10357 <ul>
10358   <li>Updated artwork matching http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
10359   <li>Multi-arch i386/amd64 USB stick ISO available.</li>
10360   <li>Got rid of ispell/wordlist related debconf questions that showed
10361     up for some language options.</li>
10362   <li>Switched to using http.debian.net as APT source by default.</li>
10363   <li>Fixed proxy configuration on Main Server installations.</li>
10364   <li>Changed LTSP setup to ask dpkg to use force-unsafe-io the same way
10365     d-i is doing it.</li>
10366   <li>Made sure root and user passwords were not left behind in the
10367     debconf database after installation on Main Server installations.</li>
10368   <li>Made Roaming Workstation dynamic setup more robust and added draft
10369     script setup-ad-client to hook a Roaming Workstation up to a
10370     Active Directory server instead of a Debian Edu Main Server.</li>
10371   <li>Update system to install needed firmware packages during
10372     installation, to work properly in Wheezy.</li>
10373   <li>Update system to handle hardware quirks (debian-edu-hwsetup).</li>
10374   <li>Corrected PXE installation setup to properly pass selected desktop
10375     and keymap settings to PXE installation clients.</li>
10376   <li>LTSP diskless workstations use sshfs by default, allowing them to
10377     work without adding them to DNS and NIS netgroups for NFS access.</li>
10378 </ul>
10379 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
10380 <ul>
10381   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
10382     available yet (698840).</li>
10383   <li>Artwork not enabled for all desktops.</li>
10384 </ul>
10385 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
10386
10387 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
10388 <ul>
10389   <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>
10390   <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>
10391   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso .</li>
10392 </ul>
10393
10394 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 2b161a99d2a848c376d8d04e3854e30c
10395 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 498922e9c508c0a7ee9dbe1dfe5bf830d779c3c8</p>
10396
10397 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
10398 <ul>
10399   <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>
10400   <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>
10401   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso .</li>
10402 </ul>
10403
10404 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 25e808e403a4c15dbef1d13c37d572ac
10405 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 15ecfc93eb6b4f453b7eb0bc04b6a279262d9721</p>
10406
10407 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
10408
10409 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
10410
10411       </div>
10412       <div class="tags">
10413
10414
10415         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>.
10416
10417
10418       </div>
10419     </div>
10420     <div class="padding"></div>
10421
10422     <div class="entry">
10423       <div class="title">
10424         <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>
10425       </div>
10426       <div class="date">
10427         25th June 2013
10428       </div>
10429       <div class="body">
10430         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
10431 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
10432 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
10433 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
10434 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
10435 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
10436 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
10437 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
10438 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
10439 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
10440 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
10441
10442 <p><pre>
10443 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
10444 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
10445 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
10446 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
10447 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
10448 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
10449 firmware-ipw2x00
10450 firmware-ipw2x00
10451 Preconfiguring packages ...
10452 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
10453 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
10454 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
10455 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
10456 #
10457 </pre></p>
10458
10459 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
10460 printed instead:</p>
10461
10462 <p><pre>
10463 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
10464 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
10465 #
10466 </pre></p>
10467
10468 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
10469 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
10470
10471 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
10472 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
10473 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
10474 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
10475 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
10476 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
10477 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
10478 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
10479 machine.</p>
10480
10481 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
10482 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
10483 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
10484 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
10485 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
10486 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
10487
10488       </div>
10489       <div class="tags">
10490
10491
10492         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>.
10493
10494
10495       </div>
10496     </div>
10497     <div class="padding"></div>
10498
10499     <div class="entry">
10500       <div class="title">
10501         <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>
10502       </div>
10503       <div class="date">
10504         22nd June 2013
10505       </div>
10506       <div class="body">
10507         <p>In the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
10508 Skolelinux</a> project, we include a post-installation test suite,
10509 which check that services are running, working, and return the
10510 expected results.  It runs automatically just after the first boot on
10511 test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
10512 installations (using non-test ISOs).  It test that the LDAP service is
10513 operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
10514 online resizable, etc, etc.  And it check that the PXE service is
10515 configured, which is the topic of this post.</p>
10516
10517 <p>The last week I've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
10518 Edu Wheezy release.  These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
10519 complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
10520 happen all the needed packages need to be on them.  Thanks to our test
10521 suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
10522 cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
10523 When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
10524 using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
10525 working packages to get it working.  And the packages changed name
10526 from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
10527 debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
10528 packages during installation.  Without our test suite, I suspect we
10529 would never have discovered this before release.  Now it is fixed
10530 right after we got the ISOs operational.</p>
10531
10532 <p>Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
10533 administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
10534 test suite using <tt>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install</tt> and see if
10535 any errors are detected.  This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
10536 the problem.</p>
10537
10538 <p>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
10539 please join us on
10540 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
10541 irc.debian.org</a> and the
10542 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@</a> mailing
10543 list.</p>
10544
10545       </div>
10546       <div class="tags">
10547
10548
10549         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>.
10550
10551
10552       </div>
10553     </div>
10554     <div class="padding"></div>
10555
10556     <div class="entry">
10557       <div class="title">
10558         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html">Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu</a>
10559       </div>
10560       <div class="date">
10561         17th June 2013
10562       </div>
10563       <div class="body">
10564         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
10565 Skolelinux</a> distribution have users and contributors all around the
10566 globe.  And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
10567 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">our IRC channel
10568 #debian-edu</a> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
10569 worked.  We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
10570 help us with translations.  And today I managed to get an interview
10571 with him, to learn more about him.</p>
10572
10573 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
10574
10575 <p>I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
10576 which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
10577 party, I had a very nice <strike>beer</strike> discussion with a
10578 friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
10579 country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
10580 community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
10581 began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
10582 constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
10583 field.</p>
10584
10585 <p>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
10586 provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
10587 activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
10588 of <a href="http://ceata.org/">Fundația Ceata</a>, which is a free
10589 software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
10590 the only one we have in our country.</p>
10591
10592 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
10593 project?</strong></p>
10594
10595 <p>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
10596 even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
10597 it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
10598 educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
10599 love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
10600 technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
10601 ways to contribute.</p>
10602
10603 <p>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
10604 configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
10605 haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
10606 areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
10607 software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
10608 one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
10609 environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
10610 for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
10611 from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
10612 have a pretty consistent starting point.</p>
10613
10614 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
10615 Edu?</strong></p>
10616
10617 <p>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
10618 maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
10619 took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
10620 Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
10621 time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
10622 with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
10623 out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
10624 it comes to managing a school's network, for example.</p>
10625
10626 <p>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
10627 availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
10628 scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
10629 only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
10630 lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
10631 project.</p>
10632
10633 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10634 Edu?</strong></p>
10635
10636 <p>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
10637 disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
10638 project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
10639 a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story.  I'd like to see
10640 Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
10641 ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
10642 lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
10643 opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
10644 to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!</p>
10645
10646 <p>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
10647 with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
10648 to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
10649 on.</p>
10650
10651 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10652
10653 <p>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
10654 daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
10655 am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
10656 Enlightenment project a lot!),
10657 <a href="http://www.claws-mail.org/‎">Claws Mail</a> due to its ease of
10658 use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
10659 <a href="https://launchpad.net/redshift">Redshift</a>, which helps me
10660 get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
10661 stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!</p>
10662
10663 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10664 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10665
10666 <p>Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
10667 now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
10668 that:</p>
10669
10670 <ul>
10671
10672 <li>schools would like to get rid of proprietary software</li>
10673
10674 <li>students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
10675     experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
10676     of teenagers more?</li>
10677
10678 <li>there is no "right one" when it comes to strategies, but it would
10679     be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
10680     other can get some inspiration from them (I know I'd promote
10681     them!)</li>
10682
10683 <li>more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
10684     lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
10685     person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)</li>
10686
10687 </ul>
10688
10689 <p>I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
10690 example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
10691 it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
10692 people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
10693 very hard to convert against their will.</p>
10694
10695       </div>
10696       <div class="tags">
10697
10698
10699         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>.
10700
10701
10702       </div>
10703     </div>
10704     <div class="padding"></div>
10705
10706     <div class="entry">
10707       <div class="title">
10708         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jonathan_Carter.html">Debian Edu interview: Jonathan Carter</a>
10709       </div>
10710       <div class="date">
10711         12th June 2013
10712       </div>
10713       <div class="body">
10714         <p>There is a certain cross-over between the
10715 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
10716 project</a> and <a href="http://www.edubuntu.org/">the Edubuntu
10717 project</a>, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint
10718 effort between the projects.  One person with a foot in both camps is
10719 Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.</p>
10720
10721 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
10722
10723 <p>I'm a South-African free software geek who lives in Cape Town. My
10724 days vary quite a bit since I'm involved in too many things. As I'm
10725 getting older I'm learning how to focus a bit more :)</p>
10726
10727 <p>I'm also an Edubuntu contributor and I love when there are
10728 opportunities for the Edubuntu and Debian Edu projects to benefit from
10729 each other.</p>
10730
10731 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
10732 project?</strong></p>
10733
10734 <p>I've been somewhat familiar with the project before, but I think my
10735 first direct exposure to the project was when I met Petter
10736 [Reinholdtsen] and Knut [Yrvin] at the Edubuntu summit in 2005 in
10737 London. They provided great feedback that helped the bootstrapping of
10738 Edubuntu. Back then Edubuntu (and even Ubuntu) was still very new and
10739 it was great getting input from people who have been around longer. I
10740 was also still very excitable and said yes to everything and to this
10741 day I have a big todo list backlog that I'm catching up with. I think
10742 over the years the relationship between Edubuntu and Debian-Edu has
10743 been gradually improving, although I think there's a lot that we could
10744 still improve on in terms of working together on packages. I'm sure
10745 we'll get there one day.</p>
10746
10747 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10748 Edu?</strong></p>
10749
10750 <p>Debian itself already has so many advantages. I could go on about
10751 it for pages, but in essence I love that it's a very honest project
10752 that puts its users first with no hidden agendas and also produces
10753 very high quality work.</p>
10754
10755 <p>I think the advantage of Debian Edu is that it makes many common
10756 set-up tasks simpler so that administrators can get up and running
10757 with a lot less effort and frustration. At the same time I think it
10758 helps to standardise installations in schools so that it's easier for
10759 community members and commercial suppliers to support.</p>
10760
10761 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10762 Edu?</strong></p>
10763
10764 <p>I had to re-type this one a few times because I'm trying to
10765 separate "disadvantages" from "areas that need improvement" (which is
10766 what I originally rambled on about)</p>
10767
10768 <p>The biggest disadvantage I can think of is lack of manpower. The
10769 project could do so much more if there were more good contributors. I
10770 think some of the problems are external too. Free software and free
10771 content in education is a no-brainer but it takes some time to catch
10772 on. When you've been working with the same proprietary eco-system for
10773 years and have gotten used to it, it can be hard to adjust to some
10774 concepts in the free software world. It would be nice if there were
10775 more Debian Edu consultants across the world. I'd love to be one
10776 myself but I'm already so over-committed that it's just not possible
10777 currently.</p>
10778
10779 <p>I think the best short-term solution to that large-scale problem is
10780 for schools to be pro-active and share their experiences and grow
10781 their skills in-house. I'm often saddened to see how much money
10782 educational institutions spend on 3rd party solutions that they don't
10783 have access to after the service has ended and they could've gotten so
10784 much more value otherwise by being more self-sustainable and
10785 autonomous.</p>
10786
10787 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10788
10789 <p>My main laptop dual-boots between Debian and Windows 7. I was
10790 Windows free for years but started dual-booting again last year for
10791 some games which help me focus and relax (Starcraft II in
10792 particular). Gaming support on Linux is improving in leaps and bounds
10793 so I suppose I'll soon be able to regain that disk space :)</p>
10794
10795 <p>Besides that I rely on Icedove, Chromium, Terminator, Byobu, irssi,
10796 git, Tomboy, KVM, VLC and LibreOffice. Recently I've been torn on
10797 which desktop environment I like and I'm taking some refuge in Xfce
10798 while I figure that out. I like tools that keep things simple. I enjoy
10799 Python and shell scripting. I went to an Arduino workshop recently and
10800 it was awesome seeing how easy and simple the IDE software was to get
10801 up and running in Debian compared to the users running Windows and OS
10802 X.</p>
10803
10804 <p>I also use mc which some people frown upon slightly. I got used to
10805 using Norton Commander in the early 90's and it stuck (I think the
10806 people who sneer at it is just jealous that they don't know how to use
10807 it :p)
10808
10809 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10810 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10811
10812 <p>I think trying to force it is unproductive. I also think that in
10813 many cases it's appropriate for schools to use non-free systems and I
10814 don't think that there's any particular moral or ethical problem with
10815 that.</p>
10816
10817 <p>I do think though that free software can already solve so so many
10818 problems in educational institutions and it's just a shame not taking
10819 advantage of that.</p>
10820
10821 <p>I also think that some curricula need serious review. For example,
10822 some areas of the world rely heavily on very specific versions of MS
10823 Office, teaching students to parrot menu items instead of learning the
10824 general concepts. I think that's very unproductive because firstly, MS
10825 Office's interface changes drastically every few years and on top of
10826 that it also locks in a generation to a product that might not be the
10827 best solution for them.</p>
10828
10829 <p>To answer your question, I believe that the right strategy is to
10830 educate and inform, giving someone the information they require to
10831 make a decision that would work for them.</p>
10832
10833       </div>
10834       <div class="tags">
10835
10836
10837         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>.
10838
10839
10840       </div>
10841     </div>
10842     <div class="padding"></div>
10843
10844     <div class="entry">
10845       <div class="title">
10846         <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>
10847       </div>
10848       <div class="date">
10849         11th June 2013
10850       </div>
10851       <div class="body">
10852         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
10853 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
10854 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
10855 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
10856 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
10857 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
10858 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
10859 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
10860 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
10861 i915 driver used by the
10862 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
10863 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
10864
10865 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
10866 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
10867 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
10868 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
10869 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
10870
10871 <pre>
10872 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
10873 update-initramfs -u -k all
10874 </pre>
10875
10876 <p>Since March 2012 there is
10877 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
10878 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
10879 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
10880 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
10881 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
10882 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
10883 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
10884 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
10885 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
10886 number.</p>
10887
10888 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
10889 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
10890
10891 <p><pre>
10892 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
10893     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
10894     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
10895  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
10896  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
10897     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
10898  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
10899     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
10900  Latency: 0
10901  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
10902  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
10903  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
10904  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
10905  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
10906  Capabilities: <access denied>
10907  Kernel driver in use: i915
10908 </pre></p>
10909
10910 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
10911
10912 <p><pre>
10913 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
10914        ...
10915         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
10916         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
10917        ...
10918 }
10919 </pre></p>
10920
10921 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
10922 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
10923 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
10924 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
10925 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
10926 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
10927 yet shown up in
10928 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
10929 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
10930 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
10931 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
10932 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
10933 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
10934
10935 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
10936 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
10937 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
10938 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
10939 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
10940 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
10941 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
10942 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
10943 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
10944 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
10945 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
10946 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
10947
10948 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
10949 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
10950 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
10951 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
10952 backlight.</p>
10953
10954       </div>
10955       <div class="tags">
10956
10957
10958         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>.
10959
10960
10961       </div>
10962     </div>
10963     <div class="padding"></div>
10964
10965     <div class="entry">
10966       <div class="title">
10967         <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>
10968       </div>
10969       <div class="date">
10970         10th June 2013
10971       </div>
10972       <div class="body">
10973         <p>The third wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
10974 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
10975
10976 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha2 released
10977 2013-06-10</strong></p>
10978
10979 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
10980 alpha2, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
10981
10982 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
10983
10984 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
10985 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
10986 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
10987 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
10988 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
10989 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
10990 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
10991 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
10992 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
10993 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
10994 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
10995 desktop contains
10996 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
10997 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
10998 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
10999 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
11000
11001 <p>This is the third test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
11002 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
11003 Squeeze release.</p>
11004
11005 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
11006
11007 <ul>
11008
11009 <li>Iceweasel was updated from 10 to 17. (DSA 2699-1)
11010 <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).
11011 <li>Switched xrdp on thin client servers to use tightvncserver instead of xvnc4.
11012 <li>Now install software oscilloscope xoscope by default.
11013 <li>Now install music tools gtick, lingot and pianobooster by default.
11014
11015 </ul>
11016
11017 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
11018
11019 <ul>
11020
11021 <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.
11022 <li>Updated translation of the installation.
11023 <li>New Romanian translation.
11024 <li>Fix security problem causing root and first user password to no longer show up in /var/cache/debconf/templates.dat.
11025 <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).
11026 <li>Made roaming workstation setup more robust in non-Debian Edu environments.
11027 <li>New script debian-edu-bless to transform a Debian installation to a Debian Edu profile.
11028 <li>Adjust Iceweasel setup to improve performance when $HOME is on NFS.
11029 <li>More testsuite tests.
11030 <li>Make automatic proxy configuration more robust.
11031 <li>Adjust GOsa² GUI configuration.
11032
11033 <li>Update thin client and diskless workstation setup to work with
11034 LTSP in Wheezy.</li>
11035
11036 <li>Diskless workstations now run out of the box -- no need to set
11037 them up with GOsa².</li>
11038
11039 <li>Update IMAP server setup. </li>
11040
11041 <li>Fix login into Skolelinux Backup Tool (Closed in
11042 slbackup-php/0.4.4-1: #700257: slbackup-php: Fails to submit correctly
11043 entered password). </li>
11044
11045 </ul>
11046
11047 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
11048
11049 <ul>
11050
11051 <li>DVD binary and source images are not yet ready.</li>
11052
11053 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
11054 available yet (Open in gosa/2.7.4-4: #698840: gosa-plugin-ldapmanager:
11055 missing import feature).</li>
11056
11057 <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others). </li>
11058
11059 <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons (Closed: #502192: menu-xdg: invents
11060 own icon names instead of using existing). This will remain
11061 unfixed.</li>
11062
11063 </ul>
11064
11065 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
11066
11067 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
11068
11069 <ul>
11070
11071 <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>
11072
11073 <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>
11074
11075 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso .</li>
11076
11077 </ul>
11078
11079 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 27bbcace407743382f3c42c08dbe8178
11080 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: e35f7d7908566cd3075375b3721fa10ee420d419</p>
11081
11082 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
11083
11084 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
11085
11086       </div>
11087       <div class="tags">
11088
11089
11090         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>.
11091
11092
11093       </div>
11094     </div>
11095     <div class="padding"></div>
11096
11097     <div class="entry">
11098       <div class="title">
11099         <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>
11100       </div>
11101       <div class="date">
11102          5th June 2013
11103       </div>
11104       <div class="body">
11105         <p>Here is a call for help from the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project.
11106 We have two problems blocking the release of the Wheezy version we
11107 hope to get released soon.  The two problems require some with PHP
11108 skills, and we seem to lack anyone with both time and PHP skills in
11109 the project:
11110
11111 <ol>
11112
11113 <li>It is impossible to log into the slbackup web interface
11114   (slbackup-php) using the root user and password.  This is
11115   <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">BTS report #700257</a>.
11116   This used to work, but stopped working some time since Squeeze.
11117   Perhaps some obsolete PHP feature was used?</li>
11118
11119 <li>It is not possible to "mass import" user lists in Gosa, neither
11120   using ldif nor using CSV files.  The feature was disabled after a
11121   major rewrite of Gosa, and need to be ported to the new system.
11122   This is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">BTS report
11123   #698840</a>.</li>
11124
11125 </ol>
11126
11127 <p>If you can help us, please join us on IRC
11128 (<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
11129 irc.debian.org</a>) and provide patches via the BTS.</p>
11130
11131       </div>
11132       <div class="tags">
11133
11134
11135         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>.
11136
11137
11138       </div>
11139     </div>
11140     <div class="padding"></div>
11141
11142     <div class="entry">
11143       <div class="title">
11144         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html">Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier</a>
11145       </div>
11146       <div class="date">
11147          4th June 2013
11148       </div>
11149       <div class="body">
11150         <p>It has been a while since my last English
11151 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
11152 interview last November.  But the developers and translators are still
11153 pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
11154 time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
11155 in the project, Cédric Boutillier.</p>
11156
11157 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
11158
11159 <p>I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
11160 professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
11161 mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
11162 probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.</p>
11163
11164 <p>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
11165 and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
11166 packaging, publicity and translation.</p>
11167
11168 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
11169 project?</strong></p>
11170
11171 <p>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
11172 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals">the
11173 Debian Edu manual</a> for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
11174 then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
11175 manual.
11176
11177 <p>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
11178 virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
11179 shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
11180 how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.</p>
11181
11182 <p>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
11183 ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
11184 by <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa²</a>.  What pleased
11185 me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
11186 there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
11187 to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
11188 artistic skills with music (<a href="http://ardour.org/">Ardour</a>,
11189 <a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>) and
11190 movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
11191 <a href="http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/">Stopmotion</a>).</p>
11192
11193 <p>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
11194 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>.
11195 Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
11196 beautiful project.</p>
11197
11198 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
11199 Edu?</strong></p>
11200
11201 <p>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
11202 community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
11203 fact that it provides a solution ready to use.</p>
11204
11205 <p>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
11206 distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
11207 of educational free software.</p>
11208
11209 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
11210 Edu?</strong></p>
11211
11212 <p>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
11213 project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
11214 not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
11215 solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
11216 is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.</p>
11217
11218 <p>One can find support from a company by looking at
11219 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp">the
11220 wiki dokumentation</a>, where some countries already have a number of
11221 companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
11222 Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
11223 for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
11224 consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
11225 support for Debian Edu as well.</p>
11226
11227 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
11228
11229 <p>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
11230 most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
11231 scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice.  I am
11232 also using the mathematical software
11233 <a href="http://www.scilab.org/en/scilab/about‎">Scilab</a> and
11234 <a href="http://www.sagemath.org/index.html‎">Sage</a> (built from
11235 source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
11236
11237 <p><strong>Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
11238 using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
11239 statistics?</strong></p>
11240
11241 <p>I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
11242 university, we use both <a href="http://www.r-project.org/‎">R</a> and
11243 Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
11244 geometry, there are nice programs:</p>
11245
11246 <ul>
11247
11248 <li><a href="http://www.drgeo.eu/">drgeo</a> and
11249 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/kig‎">kig</a> to do
11250 constructions in planar geometry
11251
11252 <li><a href="http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/kali.html">kali</a>
11253 to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
11254 groups), although the interface looks a bit old.</li>
11255
11256 </ul>
11257
11258 <p>I like also
11259 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/cantor">cantor</a>, which
11260 provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
11261 <a href="http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Octave‎">Octave</a>, etc...</p>
11262
11263 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
11264 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
11265
11266 <p>My suggestions would be to</p>
11267
11268 <ul>
11269
11270 <li>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.</li>
11271
11272 <li>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
11273     well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
11274     OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.</li>
11275
11276 <li>advertise the living and strong community around the project.</li>
11277
11278 <li>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
11279     system.</li>
11280
11281 </ul>
11282
11283       </div>
11284       <div class="tags">
11285
11286
11287         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>.
11288
11289
11290       </div>
11291     </div>
11292     <div class="padding"></div>
11293
11294     <div class="entry">
11295       <div class="title">
11296         <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>
11297       </div>
11298       <div class="date">
11299          1st June 2013
11300       </div>
11301       <div class="body">
11302         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
11303 Skolelinux</a>, there are quite a lot of educational software.
11304 Created to help teachers teach, and pupils learn.  We have tried to
11305 tag them all using debtags use::learning and role::program, and using
11306 the debtags I was happy to be able to create a collage of the
11307 educational software packages installed by default, sorted by the
11308 debtag field.  Here it is.  Click on a image to learn more about the
11309 program.</p>
11310
11311 <!-- 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 -->
11312
11313 <p><strong>field::arts</strong></p>
11314 <p>
11315 <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>
11316 <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>
11317 <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>
11318 <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>
11319 <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>
11320 <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>
11321 <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>
11322 <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>
11323 <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>
11324 <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>
11325 <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>
11326 <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>
11327 <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>
11328 <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>
11329 </p>
11330
11331 <p><strong>field::astronomy</strong></p>
11332 <p>
11333 <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>
11334 <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>
11335 <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>
11336 <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>
11337 <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>
11338 <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>
11339 </p>
11340
11341 <p><strong>field::biology:structural</strong></p>
11342 <p>
11343 <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>
11344 </p>
11345
11346 <p><strong>field::chemistry</strong></p>
11347 <p>
11348 <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>
11349 <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>
11350 <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>
11351 <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>
11352 <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>
11353 <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>
11354 <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>
11355 <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>
11356 <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>
11357 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=viewmol'>[viewmol]</a>
11358 <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>
11359 </p>
11360
11361 <p><strong>field::electronics</strong></p>
11362 <p>
11363 <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>
11364 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gpsim'>[gpsim]</a>
11365 </p>
11366
11367 <p><strong>field::geography</strong></p>
11368 <p>
11369 <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>
11370 <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>
11371 <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>
11372 </p>
11373
11374 <p><strong>field::linguistics</strong></p>
11375 <p>
11376 <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>
11377 <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>
11378 <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>
11379 <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>
11380 <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>
11381 </p>
11382
11383 <p><strong>field::mathematics</strong></p>
11384 <p>
11385 <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>
11386 <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>
11387 <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>
11388 <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>
11389 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=geomview'>[geomview]</a>
11390 <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>
11391 <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>
11392 <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>
11393 <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>
11394 <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>
11395 <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>
11396 <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>
11397 <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>
11398 <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>
11399 <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>
11400 <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>
11401 <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>
11402 </p>
11403
11404 <p><strong>field::physics</strong></p>
11405 <p>
11406 <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>
11407 <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>
11408 </p>
11409
11410 <p><strong>field::TODO</strong></p>
11411 <p>
11412 <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>
11413 <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>
11414 <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>
11415 <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>
11416 <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>
11417 <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>
11418 <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>
11419 <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>
11420 <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>
11421 <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>
11422 </p>
11423
11424 <p>In total, 61 applications.  3 of them lacked screen shots on
11425 <a href="http://screenshot.debian.net">screenshot.debian.net</a>.  If
11426 you know of some packages we should install by default, please let us
11427 know on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu
11428 on irc.debian.org</a>, or our
11429 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">mailing list
11430 debian-edu@</a>.</p>
11431
11432       </div>
11433       <div class="tags">
11434
11435
11436         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>.
11437
11438
11439       </div>
11440     </div>
11441     <div class="padding"></div>
11442
11443     <div class="entry">
11444       <div class="title">
11445         <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>
11446       </div>
11447       <div class="date">
11448         27th May 2013
11449       </div>
11450       <div class="body">
11451         <p>Two days ago, I asked
11452 <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
11453 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
11454 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
11455 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
11456 and Windows 8.</p>
11457
11458 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
11459 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
11460 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
11461 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
11462 enough to tell.</p>
11463
11464 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
11465 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
11466 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
11467 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
11468 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
11469 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
11470 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
11471 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
11472 to follow.</p>
11473
11474 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
11475 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
11476 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
11477 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
11478 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
11479 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
11480 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
11481 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
11482
11483 <p>I've updated the
11484 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
11485 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
11486 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
11487 machine.</p>
11488
11489 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
11490 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
11491
11492       </div>
11493       <div class="tags">
11494
11495
11496         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>.
11497
11498
11499       </div>
11500     </div>
11501     <div class="padding"></div>
11502
11503     <div class="entry">
11504       <div class="title">
11505         <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>
11506       </div>
11507       <div class="date">
11508         25th May 2013
11509       </div>
11510       <div class="body">
11511         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
11512 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
11513 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
11514 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
11515 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
11516 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
11517
11518 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
11519 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
11520 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
11521 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
11522 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
11523 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
11524 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
11525 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
11526 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
11527 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
11528
11529 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
11530 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
11531 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
11532 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
11533 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
11534 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
11535
11536 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
11537 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
11538 on new Laptops?</p>
11539
11540       </div>
11541       <div class="tags">
11542
11543
11544         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>.
11545
11546
11547       </div>
11548     </div>
11549     <div class="padding"></div>
11550
11551     <div class="entry">
11552       <div class="title">
11553         <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>
11554       </div>
11555       <div class="date">
11556         17th May 2013
11557       </div>
11558       <div class="body">
11559         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
11560 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
11561 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
11562 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
11563 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
11564 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
11565 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
11566 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
11567 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
11568 donate some money</a>.
11569
11570 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
11571 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
11572 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
11573 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
11574 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
11575
11576 <p>The script,
11577 <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/>
11578 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
11579 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
11580 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
11581
11582 <ol>
11583
11584 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
11585 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
11586 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
11587     our configuration.</li>
11588 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
11589     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
11590     according to the profile specified in the config above,
11591     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
11592 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
11593     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
11594 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
11595
11596 </ol>
11597
11598 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
11599 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
11600 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
11601 the needed packages.</p>
11602
11603 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
11604 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
11605 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
11606 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
11607 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
11608 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
11609
11610 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
11611 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
11612 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
11613
11614 <p><pre>
11615 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
11616 DESKTOP="lxde"
11617 </pre></p>
11618
11619 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
11620 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
11621 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
11622 boot.</p>
11623
11624       </div>
11625       <div class="tags">
11626
11627
11628         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>.
11629
11630
11631       </div>
11632     </div>
11633     <div class="padding"></div>
11634
11635     <div class="entry">
11636       <div class="title">
11637         <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>
11638       </div>
11639       <div class="date">
11640         14th May 2013
11641       </div>
11642       <div class="body">
11643         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
11644 project</a> is making great progress and made its second Wheezy based
11645 release today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
11646
11647 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha1 released
11648 2013-05-14</strong></p>
11649
11650 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
11651 alpha1, based on <a href="http://www.debian.org">Debian</a> with
11652 codename "Wheezy".</p>
11653
11654 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
11655
11656 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
11657 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
11658 configured school network. Immediatly after installation a school
11659 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
11660 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
11661 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
11662 initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all
11663 other machines can be installed via the network.</p>
11664
11665 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
11666 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
11667 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
11668
11669 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
11670 <ul>
11671   <li>Install freemind (0.9.0) by default, and stop installing vym by
11672     default.</li>
11673   <li>Install chromium (26.0.1410.43) by default.</li>
11674   <li>Install goplay (0.5-1.1) to make golearn available by default.</li>
11675   <li>Updated support for Japanese input methods, now based on
11676     ibus-anthy.</li>
11677 </ul>
11678
11679 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
11680 <ul>
11681
11682   <li>Switched default file system from ext3 to ext4 for speed and
11683     reliability improvements.</li>
11684   <li>Got rid of unwanted winbind daemon and PAM setup activated because
11685     of <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706434">706434</a>.</li>
11686   <li>Extended and improved the testsuite tests to detect more possible
11687     problems.</li>
11688   <li>Corrected proxy handling to not set http_proxy to a bogus
11689     direct:// URL.</li>
11690   <li>Corrected proxy setup for diskless workstations.</li>
11691   <li>Corrected PXE setup to use our updated udebs during installation.</li>
11692   <li>Made installation handling of low entropy level more robust.</li>
11693   <li>Create larger partitions for Roaming workstations and Thin client
11694     servers, to make room for all the software installed.</li>
11695   <li>Fix bug in Roaming workstation PAM setup, making it impossible to
11696     log in (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706753">706753</a>).</li>
11697 </ul>
11698
11699 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
11700 <ul>
11701
11702   <li>IP resolution for the local hostname give useless IPv6 address
11703     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/705900">705900</a>).  Only install
11704     libnss-myhostname on roaming workstations until it is fixed.</li>
11705   <li>DVD images are not yet ready.</li>
11706   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
11707     available yet (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">698840</a>).</li>
11708   <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others).</li>
11709   <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons.</li>
11710   <li>LXDE menu lacks entry for changing GOsa password
11711     (website). Installing gosa-desktop will be an option.</li>
11712   <li>Backup configuration via web interface is impossible due to
11713     password submission problem
11714     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">700257</a>).</li>
11715
11716 </ul>
11717
11718 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
11719
11720 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
11721 <ul>
11722
11723   <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>
11724   <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>
11725   <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>
11726
11727 </ul>
11728
11729 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 685ed76c1aa8e44b12d3fde21faf450b</p>
11730
11731 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 6c874de157024da13e115bab29c068080a11ec4c</p>
11732
11733 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
11734
11735 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
11736
11737       </div>
11738       <div class="tags">
11739
11740
11741         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>.
11742
11743
11744       </div>
11745     </div>
11746     <div class="padding"></div>
11747
11748     <div class="entry">
11749       <div class="title">
11750         <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>
11751       </div>
11752       <div class="date">
11753         11th May 2013
11754       </div>
11755       <div class="body">
11756         <P>In January,
11757 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
11758 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
11759 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
11760 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
11761 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
11762 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
11763 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
11764 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
11765 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
11766 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
11767 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
11768 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
11769
11770 <p><table>
11771 <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>
11772 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
11773 <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>
11774 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
11775 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
11776 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
11777 <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>
11778 <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>
11779 <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>
11780 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
11781 </table></p>
11782
11783 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
11784 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
11785 available in experimental.</p>
11786
11787 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
11788 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
11789 for LEGO designers.</p>
11790
11791       </div>
11792       <div class="tags">
11793
11794
11795         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>.
11796
11797
11798       </div>
11799     </div>
11800     <div class="padding"></div>
11801
11802     <div class="entry">
11803       <div class="title">
11804         <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>
11805       </div>
11806       <div class="date">
11807          5th May 2013
11808       </div>
11809       <div class="body">
11810         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
11811 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
11812 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
11813 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
11814 soon.</p>
11815
11816 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
11817 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
11818 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
11819 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
11820 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
11821 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
11822 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
11823 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
11824 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
11825 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
11826 Edu.</a>
11827
11828 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
11829 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
11830 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
11831 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
11832 follow.<p>
11833
11834       </div>
11835       <div class="tags">
11836
11837
11838         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>.
11839
11840
11841       </div>
11842     </div>
11843     <div class="padding"></div>
11844
11845     <div class="entry">
11846       <div class="title">
11847         <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>
11848       </div>
11849       <div class="date">
11850         26th April 2013
11851       </div>
11852       <div class="body">
11853         <p>The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made
11854 its first Wheezy based release today.  This is the release
11855 announcement:</p>
11856
11857 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu ~7.0.0 alpha0 released
11858 2013-04-26</strong></p>
11859
11860 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux ~7.0.0
11861 edu alpha0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
11862
11863 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
11864
11865 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
11866 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
11867 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
11868 network. Immediatly after installation a school server running all
11869 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
11870 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
11871 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
11872 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
11873 installed via the network.</p>
11874
11875 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
11876 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
11877 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
11878
11879 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
11880
11881 <ul>
11882 <li>Everything which is new in Debian Wheezy, eg:
11883   <ul>
11884      <li>Linux kernel 3.2.x</li>
11885      <li>Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.8.4, GNOME 3.4, and LXDE 4
11886          (KDE is installed by default; to choose GNOME or LXDE: see
11887          manual.)</li>
11888      <li>Web browser Iceweasel 10 ESR</li>
11889      <li>LibreOffice 3.5.4</li>
11890      <li>LTSP 5.4.2</li>
11891      <li>GOsa 2.7.4</li>
11892      <li>CUPS print system 1.5.3</li>
11893      <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 12.01</li>
11894      <li>Music creator Rosegarden 12.04</li>
11895      <li>Image editor Gimp 2.8.2</li>
11896      <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.1</li>
11897      <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.11.3</li>
11898      <li>Scratch visual programming environment 1.4.0.6</li>
11899      <li>New version of debian-installer from Debian Wheezy, see
11900          <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual">installation
11901          manual</a> for more details.</li>
11902      <li>Debian Wheezy includes about 37000 packages available for
11903          installation.</li>
11904      <li>More information about Debian Wheezy 7.0 is provided in the
11905          <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>
11906   </ul></li>
11907 </ul>
11908
11909 <p><strong>Documentation</strong></p>
11910 <ul>
11911 <li>The (<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy">English</a>) Debian Edu Wheezy Manual is fully translated to
11912     German, French, Italian and Danish. Partly translated versions exist
11913     for Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.</li>
11914 </ul>
11915
11916 <p><Strong>LDAP related changes</strong></p>
11917 <ul>
11918 <li>Slight changes to some objects and acls to have more types to
11919     choose from when adding systems in GOsa. Now systems can be of type
11920     server, workstation, printer, terminal or netdevice.</li>
11921 </ul>
11922
11923 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
11924 <ul>
11925 <li>LTSP clients start as diskless workstation / thin client can be
11926     configured via command line argument -- or individually adding an
11927     entry in lts.conf or LDAP.<li>
11928 <li>GOsa gui: Now some options that seemed to be available, but are non
11929     functional, are greyed out (or are not clickable). Some tabs are
11930     completely hidden to the end user, others even to the GOsa admin.</li>
11931 </ul>
11932
11933 <p><strong>Regressions</strong></p>
11934 <ul>
11935 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv) available
11936     yet.</li>
11937 </ul>
11938
11939 <p><strong>No updated artwork</strong></p>
11940
11941 <ul>
11942 <li>Updated artwork which is visible during installation, in the login
11943     screen and as desktop wallpaper is still missing or the same as we
11944     had for our Squeeze based release.</li>
11945 </ul>
11946
11947 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
11948
11949 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
11950 <ul>
11951 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
11952 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
11953 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</li>
11954 </ul>
11955
11956 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: c5e773ddafdaa4f48c409c682f598b6c</p>
11957
11958 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 25934fabb9b7d20235499a0a51f08ce6c54215f2</p>
11959
11960 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
11961
11962 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
11963
11964       </div>
11965       <div class="tags">
11966
11967
11968         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>.
11969
11970
11971       </div>
11972     </div>
11973     <div class="padding"></div>
11974
11975     <div class="entry">
11976       <div class="title">
11977         <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>
11978       </div>
11979       <div class="date">
11980         16th April 2013
11981       </div>
11982       <div class="body">
11983         <p>This years first <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux /
11984 Debian Edu</a> developer gathering take place the coming weekend in Trondheim.
11985 Details about the gathering can be found
11986 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2013-04-19-21-Trondheim">on
11987 the FRiSK wiki</a>.  The dates are 19-21th of April 2013, and online
11988 participation for those unable to make it in person is very welcome,
11989 and I plan to participate online myself as I could not leave Oslo this
11990 weekend.</p>
11991
11992 <p>The focus of the gathering is to work on the web pages and project
11993 infrastructure, and to continue the work on the Wheezy based Debian
11994 Edu release.</p>
11995
11996 <p>See you on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu on irc.debian.org,</a> then?</p>
11997
11998       </div>
11999       <div class="tags">
12000
12001
12002         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>.
12003
12004
12005       </div>
12006     </div>
12007     <div class="padding"></div>
12008
12009     <div class="entry">
12010       <div class="title">
12011         <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>
12012       </div>
12013       <div class="date">
12014          3rd April 2013
12015       </div>
12016       <div class="body">
12017         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
12018 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
12019 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
12020 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
12021
12022 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
12023 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
12024 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
12025 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
12026 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
12027 BTS. :)</p>
12028
12029       </div>
12030       <div class="tags">
12031
12032
12033         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>.
12034
12035
12036       </div>
12037     </div>
12038     <div class="padding"></div>
12039
12040     <div class="entry">
12041       <div class="title">
12042         <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>
12043       </div>
12044       <div class="date">
12045         26th March 2013
12046       </div>
12047       <div class="body">
12048         <p>Would you like to help the environment and save money at the same
12049 time, without much sacrifice?  A small step could be to change the
12050 font you use when printing.</p>
12051
12052 <p>Three years ago,
12053 <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/04/last-year-printer-comparison-website/">Ars
12054 Technica</a> reported how the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
12055 changed their default front from
12056 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial">Arial</a> to
12057 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Gothic">Century
12058 Gothic</a> to save money.  The Century Gothic font uses 30% less toner
12059 than Arial to print the same text.  In other word, you could cut your
12060 toner costs by 30% (or actually, increase your toner supply life time
12061 by more than 30%), by simply changing the default font used in your
12062 prints.</p>
12063
12064 <p>But it is not quite obvious how much one will save by switching.
12065 The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay said it used $100,000 per year
12066 on ink and toner cartridges, according to
12067 <a href="http://www.twincities.com/ci_14833097">a report from
12068 TwinCities.com</a>, and expected to save between $5,000 and $10,000
12069 per year by asking staff and students to use a different font.  Not
12070 all PDFs and documents are created internally, and those from external
12071 sources will most likely still use a different font.  Also, the
12072 Century Gothic font is slightly wider than Arial, and thus might use
12073 more sheets of paper to print the same text, so the total saving
12074 depend on the documents printed.</p>
12075
12076 <p>But it is definitely something to consider, if you want to reduce
12077 the amount of trash, decrease the amount of toner used in the world,
12078 and save some money in the process.</p>
12079
12080 <p>Update 2013-04-10: If you want to know how much ink/toner could be
12081 saved when switching between fonts, Inkfarm got a
12082 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/What-the-Font">service to calculate the
12083 difference between font pairs</a>.  They also
12084 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/Recommended-Ink-Saving-Fonts---">recommend
12085 which fonts to use</a> to save ink.  Check it out. :) While updating
12086 this blog post, I also came across a blog post from InkCloners,
12087 <a href="http://inkcloners.com/blog/ink-cartridges/change-fonts-to-save-ink-costs/">listing
12088 the fonts they recommend</a>, with Centory Gothic at the top.</p>
12089
12090       </div>
12091       <div class="tags">
12092
12093
12094         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12095
12096
12097       </div>
12098     </div>
12099     <div class="padding"></div>
12100
12101     <div class="entry">
12102       <div class="title">
12103         <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>
12104       </div>
12105       <div class="date">
12106         24th March 2013
12107       </div>
12108       <div class="body">
12109         <p>A few days ago, during a discussion in
12110 <a href="http://www.efn.no/">EFN</a> about interesting books to read
12111 about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
12112 the 1968 short story Kodémus by
12113 <a href="http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/">Tore Åge Bringsværd</a>
12114 came up.  The text was only available in old paper books, and thus not
12115 easily available for current and future generations.  Some of the
12116 people participating in the discussion contacted the author, and
12117 reported back 2013-03-19 that the author was OK with releasing the
12118 short story using a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative
12119 Commons</a> license.  The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
12120 were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.</p>
12121
12122 <p>As I already had some experience formatting text in my project to
12123 provide a Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence
12124 Lessig, I chipped in and set up a
12125 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">DocBook</a> processing framework to
12126 generate PDF, HTML and EPUB version of the short story.  The tools to
12127 transform DocBook to different formats are already in my Linux
12128 distribution of choice, <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>, so
12129 all I had to do was to use the
12130 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a>,
12131 <a href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README">dbtoepub</a>
12132 and <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/">xmlto</a> tools to do the
12133 conversion.  After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
12134 xsltproc/fop (aka
12135 <a href="http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets">docbook-xsl</a>),
12136 to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
12137 nicer &lt;variablelist&gt; typesetting, but that is just a minor
12138 technical detail.</p>
12139
12140 <p>There were a few challenges, of course.  We want to typeset the
12141 short story to look like the original, and that require fairly good
12142 control over the layout.  The original short story have three
12143 parts/scenes separated by a single horizontally centred star (*), and
12144 the paragraphs do not contain only flowing text, but dialogs and text
12145 that started on a new line in the middle of the paragraph.</p>
12146
12147 <p>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
12148 single star in it, ie &lt;para&gt;*&lt;/para&gt;, but it made sure a
12149 placeholder indicated where the scene shifted.  This did not look too
12150 good without the centring.  The next approach was to create a new
12151 preprocessor directive &lt;?newscene?&gt;, mapping to "&lt;hr/&gt;"
12152 for HTML and "&lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;&lt;fo:leader
12153 leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;&lt;/fo:block&gt;"
12154 for FO/PDF output (did not try to implement this in dblatex, as we had
12155 switched at this time).  The HTML XSL file looked like this:</p>
12156
12157 <p><blockquote><pre>
12158 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
12159 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
12160   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
12161     &lt;hr/&gt;
12162   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
12163 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
12164 </pre></blockquote></p>
12165
12166 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
12167
12168 <p><blockquote><pre>
12169 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
12170 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
12171   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
12172     &lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;
12173       &lt;fo:leader leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;
12174     &lt;/fo:block&gt;
12175   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
12176 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
12177 </pre></blockquote></p>
12178
12179 <p>Finally, I came across the &lt;bridgehead&gt; tag, which seem to be
12180 a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced &lt;?newscene?&gt;
12181 with &lt;bridgehead&gt;*&lt;/bridgehead&gt;.  It isn't centred, but we
12182 can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn't
12183 enough.</p>
12184
12185 <p>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
12186 linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
12187 directive &lt;?linebreak?&gt;, mapping to &lt;br/&gt; in HTML, and
12188 &lt;fo:block/&gt; in FO/PDF.  I suspect there are better ways to do
12189 this, and welcome ideas and patches on github.  The HTML XSL file now
12190 look like this:</p>
12191
12192 <p><blockquote><pre>
12193 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
12194 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
12195   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
12196     &lt;br/&gt;
12197   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
12198 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
12199 </pre></blockquote></p>
12200
12201 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
12202
12203 <p><blockquote><pre>
12204 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
12205 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'
12206   xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"&gt;
12207   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
12208     &lt;fo:block/&gt;
12209   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
12210 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
12211 </pre></blockquote></p>
12212
12213 <p>One unsolved challenge is our wish to expose different ISBN numbers
12214 per publication format, while keeping all of them in some conditional
12215 structure in the DocBook source.  No idea how to do this, so we ended
12216 up listing all the ISBN numbers next to their format in the colophon
12217 page.</p>
12218
12219 <p>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
12220 <a href="https://github.com/sickel/kodemus">source repository at
12221 github</a>
12222 (<a href="https://github.com/EFN/kodemus">future/new/official
12223 repository</a>).  We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
12224 days.</p>
12225
12226       </div>
12227       <div class="tags">
12228
12229
12230         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>.
12231
12232
12233       </div>
12234     </div>
12235     <div class="padding"></div>
12236
12237     <div class="entry">
12238       <div class="title">
12239         <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>
12240       </div>
12241       <div class="date">
12242         17th March 2013
12243       </div>
12244       <div class="body">
12245         <p>Via
12246 <a href="https://twitter.com/pcwizz/status/313044373262716930">twitter</a>
12247 I just discovered that <a href="http://pcwizz.net/">Pcwizz</a> have
12248 done a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPzTZ61Pcuc">video
12249 review</a> on Youtube of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
12250 / Debian Edu</a> version 6.  He installed the standalone profile and
12251 the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of
12252 a few programs and his view of our distribution.</p>
12253
12254 <p>There is also some really nice quotes (transcribed by me, might
12255 have heard wrong).  While looking thought the Graphics menu:</p>
12256
12257 <blockquote>
12258 "Basically everything you ever need in a school environment."
12259 </blockquote>
12260
12261 <p>And as a general evaluation of the entire distribution:</p>
12262
12263 <blockquote>
12264 "So, yeah, a bit bloated.  It kept all the Debian stuff in there, just
12265 to keep it nice and GNU.  So, I do not want to go on about it, but
12266 lets give it 7 out of 10.  I am not going to use it.  That is because
12267 I am not deploying a school network.  There may be some mythical
12268 feature to help you deploy Skolelinux on a school network."
12269 </blockquote>
12270
12271 <p>To bad he did not test the server profile, and discovered the PXE
12272 installation option.  It make it possible to install only the main
12273 server from CD, and the rest of the machines via the net, and might be
12274 considered the mythical feature he talk about. :)</p>
12275
12276 <p>While looking through the menus, there is also this funny comment
12277 about the part of the K menu generated from the Debian menu subsystem:
12278
12279 <blockquote>
12280 "[The K menu] have a special Debian section for software that no-one
12281 is going to look at, because it contain lots of junky stuff that you
12282 actually don't need in the education distribution, but have just been
12283 included because it isn't stripped out for some reason."
12284 </blockquote>
12285
12286 <p>I guess it is yet another argument for merging the Debian menu and
12287 Gnome/KDE desktop menu entries into
12288 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/DebianMenuUsingDesktopEntries">one
12289 consistent menu system</a> instead of two incomplete and partly
12290 inconsistent menu systems.</p>
12291
12292 <p>The entire video is available below for those accepting iframe
12293 embedding:</p>
12294
12295 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wPzTZ61Pcuc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
12296
12297       </div>
12298       <div class="tags">
12299
12300
12301         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>.
12302
12303
12304       </div>
12305     </div>
12306     <div class="padding"></div>
12307
12308     <div class="entry">
12309       <div class="title">
12310         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html">First Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze update released</a>
12311       </div>
12312       <div class="date">
12313          8th March 2013
12314       </div>
12315       <div class="body">
12316         <p>Last Sunday, 2013-03-03,, Holger Levsen announced the first update
12317 of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
12318 based on Debian Squeeze.  This is the first update since
12319 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
12320 initial release 2012-03-11</a>.  This is the
12321 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2013/03/msg00000.html">release
12322 announcement email from Holger</a>:</p>
12323
12324 <blockquote><p>Hi,</p>
12325
12326 <p>it's my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Debian
12327 Edu 6.0.7+r1 ("Debian Edu Squeeze").</p>
12328
12329 <p>Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 is an incremental update to Debian Edu
12330 6.0.4+r0, containing all the changes between Debian 6.0.4 and 6.0.7 as
12331 well Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements. See below (in this
12332 mail) for the full list of (edu) changes.  Please see
12333 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311">http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311</a>
12334 for more information on "Debian Edu Squeeze".</p>
12335
12336 <p>Images are available for download at
12337 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/</a></p>
12338
12339 <p>md5sums:
12340 <br>1fe79eb4f0f9ae1c58fc318e26cc1e2e  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
12341 <br>a6ddd924a8bd9a1b5ca122e8fe1c34ec  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
12342 <br>ac6c72cd7925ccec51bfbf58e2a7c69c  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
12343
12344 <p>sha1sums:
12345 <br>a4b58233b672a99c7df8dc24fb6de3327654a5c3  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
12346 <br>9b524915e0ff2aa793f13d93123e5bd2bab2dbaa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
12347 <br>43997614893fc5e9e59ad6ce066b05d07fd836fa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
12348
12349 <p>These images are suitable for amd64+i386.</p>
12350
12351 <p>Changes for Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 Codename "Squeeze", released
12352 2013-03-03:</p>
12353
12354 <ul>
12355   <li>sitesummary was updated from 0.1.3 to 0.1.8
12356   <ul>
12357         <li>Make Nagios configuration more robust and efficient</li>
12358         <li>Comply with 3.X kernel</li>
12359   </ul></li>
12360   <li>debian-edu-doc from 1.4~20120310~6.0.4+r0 to 1.4~20130228~6.0.7+r1
12361   <ul>
12362         <li>Minor updates from the wiki</li>
12363         <li>Danish translation now complete</li>
12364   </ul></li>
12365   <li>debian-edu-config from 1.453 to 1.455
12366      <ul>
12367         <li>Fix /etc/hosts for LTSP diskless workstations. Closes: #699880</li>
12368         <li>Make ltsp_local_mount script work for multiple devices.</li>
12369         <li>Correct Kerberos user policy: don't expire password after 2 days.
12370                 Closes: #664596</li>
12371         <li>Handle '#' characters in the root or first users password.
12372                 Closes: #664976</li>
12373         <li>Fixes for gosa-sync:
12374            <ul>
12375                 <li>Don't fail if password contains "</li>
12376                 <li>Don't disclose new password string in syslog</li>
12377            </ul></li>
12378         <li>Fixes for gosa-create:
12379            <ul>
12380                 <li>Invalidate libnss cache before applying changes</li>
12381                 <li>Multiple failures during mass user import into GOsa²</li>
12382                 <li>gosa-netgroups plugin: don't erase entries of attribute type
12383                          "memberNisNetgroup". Closes: #687256</li>
12384                 <li>First user now uses the same Kerberos policy as all other users</li>
12385            </ul></li>
12386         <li>Add Danish web page</li>
12387     </ul>
12388   <li>debian-edu-install from 1.528 to 1.530
12389     <ul>
12390         <li>Improve preseeding support and documentation</li>
12391     </ul></li>
12392 </ul>
12393
12394 <p>End-user documentation in English is available at
12395 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/</a>
12396 - translations to French, Italian, Danish and German are available in
12397 the debian-edu-doc package. (Other languages could use your help!)</p>
12398
12399 <p>If you want to contribute to Debian Edu, please join our
12400 mailinglist
12401 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@lists.debian.org</a>!
12402 </p></blockquote>
12403
12404 <p>I am very happy to see the fruits of a year of hard work. :)</p>
12405
12406       </div>
12407       <div class="tags">
12408
12409
12410         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>.
12411
12412
12413       </div>
12414     </div>
12415     <div class="padding"></div>
12416
12417     <div class="entry">
12418       <div class="title">
12419         <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>
12420       </div>
12421       <div class="date">
12422          3rd March 2013
12423       </div>
12424       <div class="body">
12425         <p>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
12426 broadcast them on the air?  Using free software?  With video on demand
12427 support using
12428 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
12429 open standards</a>?  Included a web based video stream as well?  And
12430 administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world?  A
12431 few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
12432 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> have been building a
12433 system to do just this.  The source code for the solution is licensed
12434 using the GNU LGPL, and
12435 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from github</a>.</p>
12436
12437 <p>The idea is simple.  You upload a video file over the web, and
12438 attach meta information to the file.  You select a time slot in the
12439 program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
12440 in the web stream.  It is also made available in a video on demand
12441 solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time.  All
12442 you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.</p>
12443
12444 <p>There are several parts to this web based solution.  I'll mention
12445 the three most important ones.  The first part is the database of
12446 videos and the schedule.  This is written in Django and include a REST
12447 API.  The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
12448 PostgreSQL.  At the moment this system can be tested on
12449 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/">beta.frikanalen.tv</a>.  The
12450 second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
12451 the database and providing a video stream to broadcast.  This is done
12452 using <a href="http://www.casparcg.com/">CasparCG from SVT</a> and
12453 <a href="http://www.mltframework.org/">Media Lovin' Toolkit</a>.  Video
12454 signal distribution is handled using
12455 <a href="http://www.ob-encoder.com/">Open Broadcast Encoder</a>.  The
12456 third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
12457 video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
12458 on demand.  It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
12459 decided what it will end up using.  Note that the source of the latter
12460 two parts are not yet pushed to github.  The lead author want to clean
12461 them up a bit more first.</p>
12462
12463 <p>The development is coordinated on the
12464 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23frikanalen">#frikanalen IRC
12465 channel</a> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
12466 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen">the
12467 frikanalen mailing list</a>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
12468 (phed on IRC).  Anyone is welcome to participate in the
12469 development.</p>
12470
12471       </div>
12472       <div class="tags">
12473
12474
12475         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>.
12476
12477
12478       </div>
12479     </div>
12480     <div class="padding"></div>
12481
12482     <div class="entry">
12483       <div class="title">
12484         <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>
12485       </div>
12486       <div class="date">
12487         27th February 2013
12488       </div>
12489       <div class="body">
12490         <p>Dr. <a href="http://www.stallman.org/">Richard Stallman</a>,
12491 founder of <a href="http://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a>,
12492 is giving <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">a
12493 talk in Oslo March 1st 2013 17:00 to 19:00</a>.  The event is public
12494 and organised by <a href="">Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG)</a>
12495 (where I am the chair of the board) and
12496 <a href="http://www.friprog.no/">The Norwegian Open Source Competence
12497 Center</a>.  The title of the talk is «The Free Software Movement and
12498 GNU», with this description:
12499
12500 <p><blockquote>
12501 The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users' freedom to
12502 cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement
12503 developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the
12504 kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.
12505 </blockquote></p>
12506
12507 <p>The meeting is open for everyone.  Due to space limitations, the
12508 doors opens for NUUG members at 16:15, and everyone else at 16:45.  I
12509 am really curious how many will show up.  See
12510 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">the event
12511 page</a> for the location details.</p>
12512
12513       </div>
12514       <div class="tags">
12515
12516
12517         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>.
12518
12519
12520       </div>
12521     </div>
12522     <div class="padding"></div>
12523
12524     <div class="entry">
12525       <div class="title">
12526         <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>
12527       </div>
12528       <div class="date">
12529         15th February 2013
12530       </div>
12531       <div class="body">
12532         <p>If you, like me, want an updated a map for your Garmin GPS, there is
12533 now a great source of free maps available from
12534 <a href="http://www.frikart.no/garmin/index.html">Frikart</a>.  To
12535 download a map, just click on the country you are interested in, and
12536 download the map type you want.  There are 8 different maps available,
12537 using different colours and data selection.  Pick one of Roadmap, Topo
12538 Summer, Topo Winter, Roadmap II, Topo Summer II, Topo Winter II,
12539 "Trails - overlay map" and "Cross country - overlay map" (see the web
12540 page for descriptions).</p>
12541
12542 <p>The maps are updated weekly, so if you find something wrong in the
12543 map you can just edit the
12544 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> map source
12545 (anyone can contribute) and fetch a fixed map a week later. :)</p>
12546
12547       </div>
12548       <div class="tags">
12549
12550
12551         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>.
12552
12553
12554       </div>
12555     </div>
12556     <div class="padding"></div>
12557
12558     <div class="entry">
12559       <div class="title">
12560         <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>
12561       </div>
12562       <div class="date">
12563         12th February 2013
12564       </div>
12565       <div class="body">
12566         <p>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
12567 <a href="http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura">solution promoted
12568 by the Norwegian government</a> require that invoices are sent through
12569 one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
12570 electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
12571 facilitators.  This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
12572 transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers.  My preferred
12573 solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
12574 between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
12575 protocol like REST or SOAP.  But this might also be overkill, as the
12576 "electronic" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
12577 using a simple bar code.  My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
12578 codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there.  The
12579 content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
12580 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard">the vCard format</a>, as
12581 it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.</p>
12582
12583 <p>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
12584 information can be included using such extentions.  For example an
12585 invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
12586 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">ask
12587 for donations to the Debian Edu project</a> and thus have bank account
12588 information publicly available) for NOK 1000.00 could have these extra
12589 fields:</p>
12590
12591 <p><pre>
12592 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
12593 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
12594 X-INVOICE-KID:123412341234
12595 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
12596 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
12597 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
12598 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
12599 </pre></p>
12600
12601 <p>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
12602 answer regarding
12603 <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file">how
12604 to put bank account information into a vCard</a>.  For payments in
12605 Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
12606 used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.</p>
12607
12608 <p>The complete vCard could look like this:</p>
12609
12610 <p><pre>
12611 BEGIN:VCARD
12612 VERSION:2.1
12613 ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
12614 ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei 29D;OSLO;;0485;Norway
12615 URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
12616 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
12617 REV:20130212T095000Z
12618 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
12619 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
12620 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
12621 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
12622 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
12623 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
12624 END:VCARD
12625 </pre></p>
12626
12627 <p>The resulting QR code created using
12628 <a href="http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/">qrencode</a> would look
12629 like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
12630 phone, or for example the <a href="http://zbar.sourceforge.net/">zbar
12631 bar code reader</a> and feed right into the approval and accounting
12632 system.</p>
12633
12634 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-12-qr-invoice.png"></p>
12635
12636 <p>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
12637 vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
12638 handling invoices.  I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
12639 are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.</p>
12640
12641 <p><strong>Update 2013-02-12 11:30</strong>: Added KID to the proposal
12642 based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.</p>
12643
12644       </div>
12645       <div class="tags">
12646
12647
12648         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>.
12649
12650
12651       </div>
12652     </div>
12653     <div class="padding"></div>
12654
12655     <div class="entry">
12656       <div class="title">
12657         <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>
12658       </div>
12659       <div class="date">
12660         10th February 2013
12661       </div>
12662       <div class="body">
12663         <p><img align="left" style="margin-right:25px;" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-10-morning-light.jpeg"></p>
12664
12665 <p>With kids in the house, one challenge is getting them to sleep
12666 during the night and wake up when it is morning.  I mean, when I
12667 believe it is morning, and not two hours earlier.  In our household we
12668 have decided that 07:00 is the turning point, but getting the kids to
12669 sleep until 07:00 is a small challenge every day.  They have adapted
12670 quite well, and rarely wake up at 05:00 any more, but some times wake
12671 up at times like 05:50, 06:15, 06:30 or 06:45, and it is hard to put
12672 the awake one to bed again without disturbing and waking the rest.
12673 And I understand perfectly well that they fail to sleep until 07:00
12674 some times, as there is no way for them to know if it is before or
12675 after the magic moment without coming and asking us parents.</p>
12676
12677 <p>But yesterday I came up with a method to solve this problem.  It
12678 involve home automation.  A few years ago I bought a
12679 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick">Tellstick</a> and RF
12680 switches at the local <a href="http://www.clasohlson.com/">Clas
12681 Ohlson</a> shop, allowing me to control lights and other electrical
12682 gadgets using my Linux server.  When I moved from the old flat to a
12683 small house, I put away all this equipment as most of the lighting in
12684 the house was not using wall sockets and thus not easy to connect to
12685 the gadgets I had.  But recently I bought a
12686 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick_net">Tellstick
12687 Net</a> to be able to read sensor input as well as control power
12688 sockets.  I want to control ovens in the basement to avoid the pipes
12689 to freeze, and monitor the humidity to detect flooding.  The default
12690 setup for Tellstick Net is to be controlled by the vendor web service,
12691 which to me is a security problem, but it is also possible to build
12692 ones own
12693 <a href="http://developer.telldus.com/blog/2012/03/02/help-us-develop-local-access-using-tellstick-net-build-your-own-firmware">firmware
12694 with local access</A> instead of being controlled by a Swedish
12695 company, thanks to the release of the GPL licensed firmware source
12696 code.  I plan to get that running before I let it control anything
12697 important.  But while working on this, one idea to make it easier for
12698 the kids came to me yesterday.  We can set up a night light controlled
12699 by the computer, and turn it automatically on at 07:00.  The kids can
12700 then check the light in the morning to know if they are supposed to
12701 get up or not.  They joined me in setting everything up, and I
12702 repeated the concept several times before bed times to make sure they
12703 remembered to check the light before getting up in the morning.</p>
12704
12705 <p>We tested it this morning, and all the kids stayed in bed until
12706 after 07:00, and every one of them commented on the fact that the
12707 "morning light" was turned on and signalled that the morning had
12708 arrived.  So this look like a success, and I am excited to see how
12709 this develops the next few days. :) I really hope this can allow us
12710 all to sleep a bit longer in the morning.</p>
12711
12712 <p>A nice advantage of this setup is that we can remote control when
12713 to tell the kids to get up.  We do not have to wait until 07:00, and
12714 can also delay it if we want to.</p>
12715
12716       </div>
12717       <div class="tags">
12718
12719
12720         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12721
12722
12723       </div>
12724     </div>
12725     <div class="padding"></div>
12726
12727     <div class="entry">
12728       <div class="title">
12729         <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>
12730       </div>
12731       <div class="date">
12732          2nd February 2013
12733       </div>
12734       <div class="body">
12735         <p>My
12736 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
12737 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
12738 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
12739 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
12740 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
12741 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
12742 version too.</p>
12743
12744 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
12745 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
12746 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
12747 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
12748 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
12749 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
12750 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
12751 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
12752
12753 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
12754 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
12755 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
12756 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
12757 it. :)</p>
12758
12759 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
12760 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
12761 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
12762
12763       </div>
12764       <div class="tags">
12765
12766
12767         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>.
12768
12769
12770       </div>
12771     </div>
12772     <div class="padding"></div>
12773
12774     <div class="entry">
12775       <div class="title">
12776         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
12777       </div>
12778       <div class="date">
12779         22nd January 2013
12780       </div>
12781       <div class="body">
12782         <p>Yesterday, I
12783 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
12784 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
12785 pluggable hardware devices, which I
12786 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
12787 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
12788 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
12789 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
12790 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
12791 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
12792 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
12793 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
12794 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
12795 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
12796
12797 <pre>
12798 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
12799 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
12800 </pre>
12801
12802 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
12803 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
12804 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
12805 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
12806
12807 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
12808 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
12809 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
12810 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
12811 word.</p>
12812
12813 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
12814 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
12815 process.</p>
12816
12817 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
12818 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
12819
12820       </div>
12821       <div class="tags">
12822
12823
12824         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>.
12825
12826
12827       </div>
12828     </div>
12829     <div class="padding"></div>
12830
12831     <div class="entry">
12832       <div class="title">
12833         <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>
12834       </div>
12835       <div class="date">
12836         21st January 2013
12837       </div>
12838       <div class="body">
12839         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
12840 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
12841 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
12842 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
12843 it, fetch the
12844 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
12845 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
12846 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
12847 autostart script.</p>
12848
12849 <p>The design is simple:</p>
12850
12851 <ul>
12852
12853 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
12854 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
12855
12856 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
12857 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
12858 initially did.</li>
12859
12860 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
12861 the APT database, a database
12862 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
12863 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
12864
12865 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
12866 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
12867 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
12868 package or packages.</li>
12869
12870 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
12871 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
12872
12873 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
12874 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
12875
12876 </ul>
12877
12878 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
12879 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
12880 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
12881 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
12882
12883 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
12884 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
12885 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
12886 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
12887 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
12888
12889 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
12890 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
12891 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
12892 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
12893 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
12894 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
12895 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
12896 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
12897
12898 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
12899 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
12900 '<tt>svn checkout
12901 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
12902 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
12903 devscripts package.</p>
12904
12905 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
12906 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
12907 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
12908 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
12909 instructions</a> for details.</p>
12910
12911       </div>
12912       <div class="tags">
12913
12914
12915         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>.
12916
12917
12918       </div>
12919     </div>
12920     <div class="padding"></div>
12921
12922     <div class="entry">
12923       <div class="title">
12924         <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>
12925       </div>
12926       <div class="date">
12927         19th January 2013
12928       </div>
12929       <div class="body">
12930         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
12931 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
12932 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
12933 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
12934 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
12935 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
12936 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
12937 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
12938 not a durable solution.
12939
12940 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
12941 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
12942
12943 <ul>
12944
12945 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
12946   than A4).</li>
12947 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
12948 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
12949 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
12950 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
12951 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
12952 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
12953 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
12954 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
12955 size).</li>
12956 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
12957   X.org packages.</li>
12958 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
12959   the time).
12960
12961 </ul>
12962
12963 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
12964 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
12965 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
12966 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
12967 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
12968 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
12969 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
12970 still be useful.</p>
12971
12972 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
12973 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
12974 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
12975 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
12976 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
12977 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
12978
12979       </div>
12980       <div class="tags">
12981
12982
12983         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>.
12984
12985
12986       </div>
12987     </div>
12988     <div class="padding"></div>
12989
12990     <div class="entry">
12991       <div class="title">
12992         <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>
12993       </div>
12994       <div class="date">
12995         18th January 2013
12996       </div>
12997       <div class="body">
12998         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
12999 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
13000 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
13001 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
13002 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
13003 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
13004 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
13005
13006 <pre>
13007 #!/usr/bin/python
13008 import sys
13009 import apt
13010 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
13011     cache = apt.Cache()
13012     cache.open(None)
13013     thepkgs = []
13014     for pkg in cache:
13015         version = pkg.candidate
13016         if version is None:
13017             version = pkg.installed
13018         if version is None:
13019             continue
13020         record = version.record
13021         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
13022             continue
13023         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
13024         for t in mime_types:
13025             t = t.rstrip().strip()
13026             if t == mimetype:
13027                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
13028     return thepkgs
13029 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
13030 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
13031     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
13032 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
13033 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
13034     print "  %s" %pkg
13035 </pre>
13036
13037 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
13038
13039 <pre>
13040 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
13041 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
13042   gecko-mediaplayer
13043 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
13044 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
13045   browser-plugin-gnash
13046 %
13047 </pre>
13048
13049 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
13050 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
13051 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
13052 anyone working on adding it?</p>
13053
13054 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
13055 request for icweasel support for this feature is
13056 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
13057 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
13058 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
13059 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
13060
13061       </div>
13062       <div class="tags">
13063
13064
13065         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>.
13066
13067
13068       </div>
13069     </div>
13070     <div class="padding"></div>
13071
13072     <div class="entry">
13073       <div class="title">
13074         <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>
13075       </div>
13076       <div class="date">
13077         16th January 2013
13078       </div>
13079       <div class="body">
13080         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
13081 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
13082 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
13083 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
13084 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
13085 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
13086 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
13087 downloaded by the browser.</p>
13088
13089 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
13090 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
13091 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
13092 can be found on the
13093 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
13094 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
13095 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
13096 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
13097 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
13098
13099 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
13100
13101 <pre>
13102   count MIME type
13103   ----- -----------------------
13104      32 text/plain
13105      30 audio/mpeg
13106      29 image/png
13107      28 image/jpeg
13108      27 application/ogg
13109      26 audio/x-mp3
13110      25 image/tiff
13111      25 image/gif
13112      22 image/bmp
13113      22 audio/x-wav
13114      20 audio/x-flac
13115      19 audio/x-mpegurl
13116      18 video/x-ms-asf
13117      18 audio/x-musepack
13118      18 audio/x-mpeg
13119      18 application/x-ogg
13120      17 video/mpeg
13121      17 audio/x-scpls
13122      17 audio/ogg
13123      16 video/x-ms-wmv
13124 </pre>
13125
13126 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
13127
13128 <pre>
13129   count MIME type
13130   ----- -----------------------
13131      33 text/plain
13132      32 image/png
13133      32 image/jpeg
13134      29 audio/mpeg
13135      27 image/gif
13136      26 image/tiff
13137      26 application/ogg
13138      25 audio/x-mp3
13139      22 image/bmp
13140      21 audio/x-wav
13141      19 audio/x-mpegurl
13142      19 audio/x-mpeg
13143      18 video/mpeg
13144      18 audio/x-scpls
13145      18 audio/x-flac
13146      18 application/x-ogg
13147      17 video/x-ms-asf
13148      17 text/html
13149      17 audio/x-musepack
13150      16 image/x-xbitmap
13151 </pre>
13152
13153 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
13154
13155 <pre>
13156   count MIME type
13157   ----- -----------------------
13158      31 text/plain
13159      31 image/png
13160      31 image/jpeg
13161      29 audio/mpeg
13162      28 application/ogg
13163      27 image/gif
13164      26 image/tiff
13165      26 audio/x-mp3
13166      23 audio/x-wav
13167      22 image/bmp
13168      21 audio/x-flac
13169      20 audio/x-mpegurl
13170      19 audio/x-mpeg
13171      18 video/x-ms-asf
13172      18 video/mpeg
13173      18 audio/x-scpls
13174      18 application/x-ogg
13175      17 audio/x-musepack
13176      16 video/x-ms-wmv
13177      16 video/x-msvideo
13178 </pre>
13179
13180 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
13181 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
13182 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
13183 issues.</p>
13184
13185 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
13186 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
13187
13188       </div>
13189       <div class="tags">
13190
13191
13192         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>.
13193
13194
13195       </div>
13196     </div>
13197     <div class="padding"></div>
13198
13199     <div class="entry">
13200       <div class="title">
13201         <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>
13202       </div>
13203       <div class="date">
13204         15th January 2013
13205       </div>
13206       <div class="body">
13207         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
13208 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
13209 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
13210 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
13211 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
13212 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
13213 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
13214 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
13215 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
13216 packages.</p>
13217
13218 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
13219 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
13220 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
13221 modalias.</p>
13222
13223 <p><blockquote>
13224 Package: package-name
13225 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
13226 </blockquote></p>
13227
13228 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
13229 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
13230
13231 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
13232 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
13233
13234 <p><blockquote>
13235 Package: cheese
13236 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
13237 </blockquote></p>
13238
13239 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
13240 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
13241
13242 <p><blockquote>
13243 Package: pcmciautils
13244 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
13245 </blockquote></p>
13246
13247 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
13248 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
13249
13250 <p><blockquote>
13251 Package: colorhug-client
13252 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
13253 </blockquote></p>
13254
13255 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
13256 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
13257 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
13258
13259 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
13260 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
13261 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
13262 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
13263 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
13264 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
13265 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
13266 Raring.</p>
13267
13268 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
13269 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
13270 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
13271 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
13272 try the
13273 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
13274 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
13275 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
13276 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
13277
13278 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
13279 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
13280
13281 <p><blockquote>
13282 % ./hw-support-lookup
13283 <br>yubikey-personalization
13284 <br>%
13285 </blockquote></p>
13286
13287 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
13288 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
13289
13290 <p><blockquote>
13291 % ./hw-support-lookup
13292 <br>pcmciautils
13293 <br>%
13294 </blockquote></p>
13295
13296 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
13297 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
13298 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
13299
13300 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
13301 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
13302 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
13303 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
13304 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
13305 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
13306 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
13307 see if it work.</p>
13308
13309 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
13310 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
13311 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
13312 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
13313
13314       </div>
13315       <div class="tags">
13316
13317
13318         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>.
13319
13320
13321       </div>
13322     </div>
13323     <div class="padding"></div>
13324
13325     <div class="entry">
13326       <div class="title">
13327         <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>
13328       </div>
13329       <div class="date">
13330         14th January 2013
13331       </div>
13332       <div class="body">
13333         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
13334 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
13335 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
13336 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
13337 in
13338 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
13339 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
13340
13341 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
13342
13343 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
13344 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
13345 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
13346 &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;,
13347 &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
13348 &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;.
13349
13350 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
13351 this shell script:</p>
13352
13353 <pre>
13354 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
13355 </pre>
13356
13357 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
13358 using modinfo:</p>
13359
13360 <pre>
13361 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
13362 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
13363 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
13364 %
13365 </pre>
13366
13367 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
13368
13369 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
13370 Bridge memory controller:</p>
13371
13372 <p><blockquote>
13373 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
13374 </blockquote></p>
13375
13376 <p>This represent these values:</p>
13377
13378 <pre>
13379  v   00008086  (vendor)
13380  d   00002770  (device)
13381  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
13382  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
13383  bc  06        (bus class)
13384  sc  00        (bus subclass)
13385  i   00        (interface)
13386 </pre>
13387
13388 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
13389 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
13390 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
13391 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
13392
13393 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
13394 means.</p>
13395
13396 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
13397
13398 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
13399 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
13400
13401 <p><blockquote>
13402 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
13403 </blockquote></p>
13404
13405 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
13406
13407 <pre>
13408  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
13409  p    0001  (device product)
13410  d    0206  (bcddevice)
13411  dc     09  (device class)
13412  dsc    00  (device subclass)
13413  dp     00  (device protocol)
13414  ic     09  (interface class)
13415  isc    00  (interface subclass)
13416  ip     00  (interface protocol)
13417 </pre>
13418
13419 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
13420 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
13421 these alias entries show up:</p>
13422
13423 <p><blockquote>
13424 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
13425 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
13426 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
13427 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
13428 </blockquote></p>
13429
13430 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
13431 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
13432 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
13433
13434 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
13435
13436 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
13437 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
13438
13439 <p><blockquote>
13440 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
13441 </blockquote></p>
13442
13443 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
13444
13445 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
13446
13447 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
13448 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
13449 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
13450
13451 <p><blockquote>
13452 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
13453 </blockquote></p>
13454
13455 <p>The values present are</p>
13456
13457 <pre>
13458  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
13459  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
13460  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
13461  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
13462  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
13463  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
13464  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
13465  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
13466  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
13467  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
13468  ct   10             (chassis type)
13469  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
13470 </pre>
13471
13472 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
13473 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
13474
13475 <pre>
13476   3 Desktop
13477   4 Low Profile Desktop
13478   5 Pizza Box
13479   6 Mini Tower
13480   7 Tower
13481   8 Portable
13482   9 Laptop
13483  10 Notebook
13484  11 Hand Held
13485  12 Docking Station
13486  13 All In One
13487  14 Sub Notebook
13488  15 Space-saving
13489  16 Lunch Box
13490  17 Main Server Chassis
13491  18 Expansion Chassis
13492  19 Sub Chassis
13493  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
13494  21 Peripheral Chassis
13495  22 RAID Chassis
13496  23 Rack Mount Chassis
13497  24 Sealed-case PC
13498  25 Multi-system
13499  26 CompactPCI
13500  27 AdvancedTCA
13501  28 Blade
13502  29 Blade Enclosing
13503 </pre>
13504
13505 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
13506 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
13507 claim it is a desktop.</p>
13508
13509 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
13510
13511 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
13512 test machine:</p>
13513
13514 <p><blockquote>
13515 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
13516 </blockquote></p>
13517
13518 <p>The values present are</p>
13519
13520 <pre>
13521   ty  01  (type)
13522   pr  00  (prototype)
13523   id  00  (id)
13524   ex  00  (extra)
13525 </pre>
13526
13527 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
13528 the valid values are.</p>
13529
13530 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
13531
13532 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
13533 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
13534 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
13535 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
13536 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
13537 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
13538 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
13539
13540 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
13541
13542 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
13543 one can use the following shell script:</p>
13544
13545 <pre>
13546   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
13547     echo "$id" ; \
13548     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
13549   done
13550 </pre>
13551
13552 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
13553 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
13554
13555 <pre>
13556   acpi:ACPI0003:
13557     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
13558   acpi:device:
13559   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
13560   acpi:IBM0068:
13561     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
13562     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
13563     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
13564     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
13565   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
13566     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
13567     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
13568     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
13569   [...]
13570 </pre>
13571
13572 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
13573 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
13574 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
13575 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
13576
13577 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
13578 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
13579 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
13580
13581       </div>
13582       <div class="tags">
13583
13584
13585         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>.
13586
13587
13588       </div>
13589     </div>
13590     <div class="padding"></div>
13591
13592     <div class="entry">
13593       <div class="title">
13594         <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>
13595       </div>
13596       <div class="date">
13597         10th January 2013
13598       </div>
13599       <div class="body">
13600         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
13601 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
13602 Launcher and updated the Debian package
13603 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
13604 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
13605 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
13606 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
13607 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
13608 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
13609 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
13610 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
13611 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
13612 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
13613 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
13614 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
13615 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
13616 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
13617 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
13618
13619       </div>
13620       <div class="tags">
13621
13622
13623         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
13624
13625
13626       </div>
13627     </div>
13628     <div class="padding"></div>
13629
13630     <div class="entry">
13631       <div class="title">
13632         <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>
13633       </div>
13634       <div class="date">
13635          9th January 2013
13636       </div>
13637       <div class="body">
13638         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
13639 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
13640 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
13641 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
13642 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
13643 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
13644 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
13645 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
13646 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
13647 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
13648 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
13649
13650 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
13651 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
13652 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
13653 simple:
13654
13655 <ul>
13656
13657 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
13658   starting when a user log in.</li>
13659
13660 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
13661   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
13662
13663 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
13664   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
13665   packages.</li>
13666
13667 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
13668   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
13669
13670 </ul>
13671
13672 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
13673 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
13674 discover database to find packages and
13675 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
13676 packages.</p>
13677
13678 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
13679 draft package is now checked into
13680 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
13681 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
13682 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
13683 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
13684 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
13685 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
13686 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
13687 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
13688 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
13689 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
13690 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
13691 because of the freeze).</p>
13692
13693 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
13694 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
13695 inserted):</p>
13696
13697 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
13698
13699 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
13700 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
13701 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
13702
13703 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
13704 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
13705 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
13706 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
13707 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
13708 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
13709 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
13710
13711 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
13712 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
13713 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
13714 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
13715 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
13716 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
13717 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
13718 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
13719 not be installed?</p>
13720
13721 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
13722 please send me an email. :)</p>
13723
13724       </div>
13725       <div class="tags">
13726
13727
13728         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>.
13729
13730
13731       </div>
13732     </div>
13733     <div class="padding"></div>
13734
13735     <div class="entry">
13736       <div class="title">
13737         <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>
13738       </div>
13739       <div class="date">
13740          2nd January 2013
13741       </div>
13742       <div class="body">
13743         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
13744 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
13745 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
13746 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
13747 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
13748 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
13749 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
13750 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
13751 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
13752 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
13753
13754 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
13755 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
13756 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
13757
13758       </div>
13759       <div class="tags">
13760
13761
13762         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>.
13763
13764
13765       </div>
13766     </div>
13767     <div class="padding"></div>
13768
13769     <div class="entry">
13770       <div class="title">
13771         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html">A Christmas present for Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
13772       </div>
13773       <div class="date">
13774         28th December 2012
13775       </div>
13776       <div class="body">
13777         <p>I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
13778 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
13779 project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
13780 Agency in Trondheim.  NOK 1000,- showed up on our donation account
13781 December 24th.  I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
13782 present.  As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
13783 funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
13784 gatherings, this donation was most welcome.  One developer gathering
13785 cost around NOK 15&nbsp;000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
13786 development pace we want.  Thus, I hope their example this year is
13787 followed by many others. :)</p>
13788
13789 <p>The public list of donors can be found on
13790 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">the
13791 donation page</a> for the project, which also contain instructions if
13792 you want to donate to the project.</p>
13793
13794       </div>
13795       <div class="tags">
13796
13797
13798         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>.
13799
13800
13801       </div>
13802     </div>
13803     <div class="padding"></div>
13804
13805     <div class="entry">
13806       <div class="title">
13807         <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>
13808       </div>
13809       <div class="date">
13810         25th December 2012
13811       </div>
13812       <div class="body">
13813         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
13814 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
13815
13816 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
13817 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
13818 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
13819 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
13820 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
13821 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
13822 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
13823 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
13824 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
13825 name.</p>
13826
13827 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
13828 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
13829 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
13830
13831 <blockquote><pre>
13832 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
13833 cd bitcoin
13834 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
13835 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
13836 </pre></blockquote>
13837
13838 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
13839 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
13840 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
13841 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
13842 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
13843 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
13844 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
13845 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
13846 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
13847
13848 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
13849 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
13850 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
13851
13852       </div>
13853       <div class="tags">
13854
13855
13856         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>.
13857
13858
13859       </div>
13860     </div>
13861     <div class="padding"></div>
13862
13863     <div class="entry">
13864       <div class="title">
13865         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
13866       </div>
13867       <div class="date">
13868         21st December 2012
13869       </div>
13870       <div class="body">
13871         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
13872 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
13873 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
13874 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
13875 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
13876 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
13877 is now maintained by a
13878 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
13879 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
13880 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
13881 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
13882 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
13883 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
13884 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
13885 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
13886 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
13887 Corallo in a
13888 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
13889 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
13890 Debian package.</p>
13891
13892 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
13893 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
13894 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
13895 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
13896 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
13897 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
13898 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
13899 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
13900 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
13901 new version to unstable.
13902
13903 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
13904 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
13905 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
13906 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
13907 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
13908 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
13909 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
13910 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
13911 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
13912 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
13913 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
13914 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
13915 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
13916 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
13917 have not tested them.</p>
13918
13919 <p>My
13920 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
13921 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
13922 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
13923 years ago, as can be
13924 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
13925 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
13926 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
13927 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
13928 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
13929 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
13930 the same address as last time,
13931 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
13932
13933       </div>
13934       <div class="tags">
13935
13936
13937         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>.
13938
13939
13940       </div>
13941     </div>
13942     <div class="padding"></div>
13943
13944     <div class="entry">
13945       <div class="title">
13946         <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>
13947       </div>
13948       <div class="date">
13949         18th December 2012
13950       </div>
13951       <div class="body">
13952         <p>A few days ago I came across
13953 <a href="http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/">a blog post from Joey
13954 Hess</a> describing <a href="http://ledger-cli.org/">ledger</a> and
13955 hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting.  I found it
13956 interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
13957 accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
13958 the different web based systems we use.  I find it hard to find what I
13959 look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
13960 the systems.  Ledger seem different.  The accounting data is kept in
13961 text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
13962
13963 are at least <a href="https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports">five
13964 different implementations</a> able to read the format.  An example
13965 entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
13966 generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:</p>
13967
13968 <blockquote><pre>
13969 2004-05-27 Book Store
13970       Expenses:Books                 $20.00
13971       Liabilities:Visa
13972 </pre></blockquote>
13973
13974 <p>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
13975 look for others using it.  I found blog posts from
13976 <a href="http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/">Christine
13977 Spang</a>,
13978 <a href="http://bugsplat.info/2010-05-23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html">Pete
13979 Keen</a>,
13980 <a href="http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2010/11/06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/">Andrew
13981 Cantino</a> and
13982 <a href="http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/2012/11/29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/">Ronald
13983 Ip</a> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
13984 <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo">Bradley
13985 M. Kuhn</a> at the Software Freedom Conservancy.  All seemed like good
13986 recommendations fitting my need.</p>
13987
13988 <p>The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html">ledger</a>
13989 package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
13990 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html">hledger</a>
13991 package only is available in Debian Sid.  As I use Squeeze, ledger
13992 seemed the best choice to get started.</p>
13993
13994 <p>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
13995 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger">web scraper</a> for
13996 <a href="http://www.lodo.no/">LODO</a>, the accounting system used by
13997 the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> association, and started to
13998 play with the data set.  I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
13999 am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
14000 using the "<tt>ledger balance</tt>" command.  But I will have to
14001 gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
14002 for the organisations I am involved in.</p>
14003
14004       </div>
14005       <div class="tags">
14006
14007
14008         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>.
14009
14010
14011       </div>
14012     </div>
14013     <div class="padding"></div>
14014
14015     <div class="entry">
14016       <div class="title">
14017         <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>
14018       </div>
14019       <div class="date">
14020          6th December 2012
14021       </div>
14022       <div class="body">
14023         <p>Where I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of
14024 Oslo</a>, we use the
14025 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/">Cerebrum user
14026 administration system</a> to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
14027 I've known since the system was written that the server is providing
14028 an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC">XML-RPC</a> API, but
14029 I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
14030 always use the bofh command line client at work.  Until today.  I want
14031 to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
14032 virtual machines.  Here are a few notes on how to use it with
14033 Python.</p>
14034
14035 <p>I started by looking at the source of the Java
14036 <a href="http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/">bofh
14037 client</a>, to figure out how it connected to the API server.  I also
14038 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
14039 <a href="http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html">a
14040 simple example in</a> the XML-RPC howto.</p>
14041
14042 <p>This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
14043 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
14044 user currently logged in:</p>
14045
14046 <blockquote><pre>
14047 #!/usr/bin/env python
14048 import getpass
14049 import xmlrpclib
14050 server_url = 'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000';
14051 username = getpass.getuser()
14052 password = getpass.getpass()
14053 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
14054 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
14055 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
14056 print server.run_command(sessionid, "user_info", username)
14057 result = server.logout(sessionid)
14058 print result
14059 </pre></blockquote>
14060
14061 <p>Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
14062 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.</p>
14063
14064       </div>
14065       <div class="tags">
14066
14067
14068         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>.
14069
14070
14071       </div>
14072     </div>
14073     <div class="padding"></div>
14074
14075     <div class="entry">
14076       <div class="title">
14077         <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>
14078       </div>
14079       <div class="date">
14080         17th November 2012
14081       </div>
14082       <div class="body">
14083         <p>While working on a
14084 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Norwegian
14085 translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a> (76% done),
14086 which cover the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles
14087 creativity, one idea occurred to me.  The idea is to get the tax
14088 office to help make more works enter the public domain and also help
14089 make it easier to clear rights for using copyrighted works.</p>
14090
14091 <p>I mentioned this idea briefly during Yesterdays
14092 <a href="http://www.farmann.no/2012/11/14/john-perry-barlow-in-oslo-friday-nov-16
14093 -15-30-19-00/">presentation
14094 by John Perry Barlow</a>, and concluded that it was best to put it
14095 in writing for a wider audience.  The idea is not really based on the
14096 argument that copyrighted works are "intellectual property", as the
14097 core requirement is that copyrighted work have value for the copyright
14098 holder and the tax office like to collect their share from any value
14099 controlled by the citizens in a country.  I'm sharing the idea here to
14100 let others consider it and perhaps shoot it down with a fresh set of
14101 arguments.</p>
14102
14103 <p>Most valuables are taxed by the government.  At least here in
14104 Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
14105 the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
14106 stocks and other valuables are all added together.  If the tax value
14107 of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
14108 taxes for these values.  And copyrighted work have value.  It have
14109 value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
14110 work.  But it is not included in the tax calculations?  Why not?</p>
14111
14112 <p>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it would want to
14113 maintain a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the
14114 rights holders for a given works, to be able to associate the works
14115 value to the right citizen or company for tax purposes.  If such
14116 database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to
14117 for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very
14118 hard operation with todays copyright law.  To ensure that copyright
14119 holders keep the database up-to-date, it would have to become a
14120 requirement to be able to collect money for granting access to
14121 copyrighted works that the work is listed in the database with the
14122 correct right holder.</p>
14123
14124 <p>If copyright causes copyright holders to have to pay more taxes,
14125 they will have a small incentive to "disown" their copyright, and let
14126 the work enter the public domain. For works with several right holders
14127 one of the right holders could state (and get it registered in the
14128 database) that she do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to
14129 use the work in question and thus will not get any income from that
14130 work.  Stating this would have to be impossible to revert and stop the
14131 tax office from adding the value of that work to the given citizens
14132 tax calculation.  I assume the copyright law would stay the same,
14133 allowing creators to pick a license of their choosing, and also
14134 allowing them to put their work directly in the public domain.  The
14135 existence of such database will make it even easier to clear rights,
14136 and if the right holders listed in the database is taxed, this system
14137 would increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.</p>
14138
14139 <p>The effect would be that the tax office help to make it easier to
14140 get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public
14141 domain and help to get more work into the public domain and .</p>
14142
14143 <p>Why have such taxing not happened yet?  I am sure the tax office
14144 would like to tax copyrighted work values if they could.</p>
14145
14146       </div>
14147       <div class="tags">
14148
14149
14150         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>.
14151
14152
14153       </div>
14154     </div>
14155     <div class="padding"></div>
14156
14157     <div class="entry">
14158       <div class="title">
14159         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html">Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß</a>
14160       </div>
14161       <div class="date">
14162         14th November 2012
14163       </div>
14164       <div class="body">
14165         <p>Here is another interview with one of the people in the <a
14166 href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
14167 community.  I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
14168 if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
14169 After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
14170 the people behind the German
14171 "<a href="http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/">IT-Zukunft Schule</a>"
14172 project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview.  Give a warm
14173 welcome to Angela Fuß. :)</p>
14174
14175 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
14176
14177 <p>I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
14178 Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
14179 two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
14180
14181 <p>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
14182 the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
14183 Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
14184 growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
14185 system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-).  We are also
14186 in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.</p>
14187
14188 <p>In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
14189 nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there.  Besides
14190 that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
14191 working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North
14192 Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
14193 relationship management and the communication processes in the
14194 project.</p>
14195
14196 <p>Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
14197 and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
14198 and a yoga teacher.</p>
14199
14200 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
14201 project?</strong></p>
14202
14203 <p>I fell in love with Mike ;-).</p>
14204
14205 <p>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
14206 Free Software.  At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
14207 founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
14208 their IT environment.  Often when Mike came home from working at the
14209 newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
14210 several points where the communication with the schools head or the
14211 teachers did not work.  So we were clear that he would not work for
14212 one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
14213 between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
14214 parents.</p>
14215
14216 <p>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
14217 started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
14218 schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
14219 Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
14220 networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
14221 Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
14222 Germany.</p>
14223
14224 <p>For information about our school project you can read
14225 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">the
14226 interview with Mike Gabriel</a>.</p>
14227
14228 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
14229 Edu?</strong></p>
14230
14231 <p>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
14232 answer comes rather from a social point of view.</p>
14233
14234 <p>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
14235 and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
14236 background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
14237 and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
14238 something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
14239 ;-). This is of course a user experience.  What I also get as a big
14240 advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
14241 works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
14242 teachers, parents...</p>
14243
14244 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
14245 Edu?</strong></p>
14246
14247 <p>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
14248 Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
14249
14250 <p>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
14251 the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
14252 marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
14253 schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
14254 I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
14255
14256 <p>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
14257 do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
14258 democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
14259 and helpful.  I am also missing some kind of contact between the
14260 Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
14261 level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
14262 different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
14263
14264 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
14265
14266 <p>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
14267 on.  As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
14268 LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
14269 my N900 running with Maemo.</p>
14270
14271 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
14272 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
14273
14274 <p>I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
14275 Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
14276 schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
14277 that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
14278 strategy has three crucial pillars:</p>
14279
14280 <ul>
14281
14282 <li>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
14283 concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
14284 kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.</li>
14285
14286 <li>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
14287 are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
14288 beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
14289 they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
14290 they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
14291 needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
14292 we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.</li>
14293
14294 <li>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
14295 co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
14296 contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
14297 offer to become more and more independent from us.</li>
14298
14299 </ul>
14300
14301       </div>
14302       <div class="tags">
14303
14304
14305         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
14306
14307
14308       </div>
14309     </div>
14310     <div class="padding"></div>
14311
14312     <div class="entry">
14313       <div class="title">
14314         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_European_Central_Bank__ECB__take_a_look_at_bitcoin.html">The European Central Bank (ECB) take a look at bitcoin</a>
14315       </div>
14316       <div class="date">
14317          4th November 2012
14318       </div>
14319       <div class="body">
14320         <p>Slashdot just ran a story about the European Central Bank (ECB)
14321 <a href="http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf">releasing
14322 a report (PDF)</a> about virtual currencies and
14323 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>.  It is interesting to
14324 see how a member of the bitcoin community
14325 <a href="http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/10/30/the-ecb-report-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currencies.html">receive
14326 the report</a>.  As for the future, I suspect the central banks and
14327 the governments will outlaw bitcoin if it gain any popularity, to avoid
14328 competition.  My thoughts go to the
14329 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wörgl">Wörgl experiment</a> with
14330 negative inflation on cash which was such a success that it was
14331 terminated by the Austrian National Bank in 1933.  A successful
14332 alternative would be a threat to the current money system and gain
14333 powerful forces to work against it.</p>
14334
14335 <p>While checking out the current status of bitcoin, I also discovered
14336 that the community already seem to have
14337 <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/27/3271637/bitcoin-savings-trust-pyramid-scheme-shuts-down">experienced
14338 its first pyramid game / Ponzi scheme</a>.  Not very surprising, given
14339 how members of "small" communities tend to trust each other.  I guess
14340 enterprising crocks will try again and again, as they do anywhere
14341 wealth is available.</p>
14342
14343       </div>
14344       <div class="tags">
14345
14346
14347         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>.
14348
14349
14350       </div>
14351     </div>
14352     <div class="padding"></div>
14353
14354     <div class="entry">
14355       <div class="title">
14356         <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>
14357       </div>
14358       <div class="date">
14359         26th October 2012
14360       </div>
14361       <div class="body">
14362         <p>I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
14363 looking after the computers, mostly on the unix side, but in general
14364 all over the place.  I am also a member (and currently leader) of
14365 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG association</a>, which in turn
14366 make me a member of <a href="http://www.usenix.org/">USENIX</a>.  NUUG
14367 is an member organisation for us in Norway interested in free
14368 software, open standards and unix like operating systems, and USENIX
14369 is a US based member organisation with similar targets.  And thanks to
14370 these memberships, I get all issues of the great USENIX magazine
14371 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">;login:</a> in the
14372 mail several times a year.  The magazine is great, and I read most of
14373 it every time.</p>
14374
14375 <p>In the last issue of the USENIX magazine ;login:, there is an
14376 article by <a href="http://www.skendric.com/">Stuart Kendrick</a> from
14377 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center titled
14378 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/october-2012-volume-37-number-5/what-takes-us-down">What
14379 Takes Us Down</a>" (longer version also
14380 <a href="http://www.skendric.com/problem/incident-analysis/2012-06-30/What-Takes-Us-Down.pdf">available
14381 from his own site</a>), where he report what he found when he
14382 processed the outage reports (both planned and unplanned) from the
14383 last twelve years and classified them according to cause, time of day,
14384 etc etc.  The article is a good read to get some empirical data on
14385 what kind of problems affect a data centre, but what really inspired
14386 me was the kind of reporting they had put in place since 2000.<p>
14387
14388 <p>The centre set up a mailing list, and started to send fairly
14389 standardised messages to this list when a outage was planned or when
14390 it already occurred, to announce the plan and get feedback on the
14391 assumtions on scope and user impact.  Here is the two example from the
14392 article: First the unplanned outage:
14393
14394 <blockquote><pre>
14395 Subject:     Exchange 2003 Cluster Issues
14396 Severity:    Critical (Unplanned)
14397 Start:       Monday, May 7, 2012, 11:58
14398 End:         Monday, May 7, 2012, 12:38
14399 Duration:    40 minutes
14400 Scope:       Exchange 2003
14401 Description: The HTTPS service on the Exchange cluster crashed, triggering
14402              a cluster failover.
14403
14404 User Impact: During this period, all Exchange users were unable to
14405              access e-mail. Zimbra users were unaffected.
14406 Technician:  [xxx]
14407 </pre></blockquote>
14408
14409 Next the planned outage:
14410
14411 <blockquote><pre>
14412 Subject:     H Building Switch Upgrades
14413 Severity:    Major (Planned)
14414 Start:       Saturday, June 16, 2012, 06:00
14415 End:         Saturday, June 16, 2012, 16:00
14416 Duration:    10 hours
14417 Scope:       H2 Transport
14418 Description: Currently, Catalyst 4006s provide 10/100 Ethernet to end-
14419              stations. We will replace these with newer Catalyst
14420              4510s.
14421 User Impact: All users on H2 will be isolated from the network during
14422              this work. Afterward, they will have gigabit
14423              connectivity.
14424 Technician:  [xxx]
14425 </pre></blockquote>
14426
14427 <p>He notes in his article that the date formats and other fields have
14428 been a bit too free form to make it easy to automatically process them
14429 into a database for further analysis, and I would have used ISO 8601
14430 dates myself to make it easier to process (in other words I would ask
14431 people to write '2012-06-16 06:00 +0000' instead of the start time
14432 format listed above).  There are also other issues with the format
14433 that could be improved, read the article for the details.</p>
14434
14435 <p>I find the idea of standardising outage messages seem to be such a
14436 good idea that I would like to get it implemented here at the
14437 university too.  We do register
14438 <a href="http://www.uio.no/tjenester/it/aktuelt/planlagte-tjenesteavbrudd/">planned
14439 changes and outages in a calendar</a>, and report the to a mailing
14440 list, but we do not do so in a structured format and there is not a
14441 report to the same location for unplanned outages.  Perhaps something
14442 for other sites to consider too?</p>
14443
14444       </div>
14445       <div class="tags">
14446
14447
14448         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix</a>.
14449
14450
14451       </div>
14452     </div>
14453     <div class="padding"></div>
14454
14455     <div class="entry">
14456       <div class="title">
14457         <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>
14458       </div>
14459       <div class="date">
14460         22nd October 2012
14461       </div>
14462       <div class="body">
14463         <p>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
14464 <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">how
14465 Amazon erased the books from a customer's kindle, locked the account
14466 and refuse to tell the customer why</a>.  If a real book store did
14467 this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property
14468 and theft.  The story has spread around the net today.  A bit more
14469 background information is available in Norwegian from
14470 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon">digi.no</a>.
14471 It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used
14472 this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was
14473 introduced many years back.  And Amazon proved in 2009 that it was
14474 willing to
14475 <a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html">
14476 break into customers equipment and remove the books</a> people had
14477 bought, when it removed the book 1984 by George Orwell from all the
14478 customers who had bought it.  From the official comments, it even
14479 sounded like
14480 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html">Amazon
14481 would never do that again</a>.  And here we are, three years
14482 later.</p>
14483
14484 <p>And thought this action is
14485 <a href="http://www.itavisen.no/904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende">against
14486 Norwegian regulations and law</a>, it is according to the terms of use
14487 as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to
14488 Norwegian laws.  It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms
14489 of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer
14490 rights.</p>
14491
14492 <p>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
14493 unacceptable terms.  For example
14494 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about 40,000
14495 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a> (1,652
14496 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The Internet
14497 Archive</a> (3,641,797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
14498 can read by anyone and shared with anyone.</p>
14499
14500 <p>Update 2012-10-23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
14501 the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
14502 restored the account of the user, as reported by
14503 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904675/helomvending-fra-amazon">digi.no</a>
14504 and <a href="http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/1.8368487">NRK</a>.
14505 Apparently public pressure work.  The story from Martin have seen
14506 several twitter messages per minute the last 24 hours, which is quite
14507 a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention.  But even when the
14508 account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist.  I recommend
14509 reading two opinions from
14510 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm">Simon
14511 Phipps</a> and
14512 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm">Glen
14513 Moody</a> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
14514 details about the original story.</p>
14515
14516       </div>
14517       <div class="tags">
14518
14519
14520         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>.
14521
14522
14523       </div>
14524     </div>
14525     <div class="padding"></div>
14526
14527     <div class="entry">
14528       <div class="title">
14529         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html">The fight for freedom and privacy</a>
14530       </div>
14531       <div class="date">
14532         18th October 2012
14533       </div>
14534       <div class="body">
14535         <p>Civil liberties and privacy in the western world are going down the
14536 drain, and it is hard to fight against it.  I try to do my best, but
14537 time is limited.  I hope you do your best too.  A few years ago I came
14538 across a marvellous drawing by
14539 <a href="http://www.claybennett.com/about.html">Clay Bennett</a>
14540 visualising some of what is going on.
14541
14542 <p><a href="http://www.claybennett.com/pages/security_fence.html">
14543 <img src="http://www.claybennett.com/images/archivetoons/security_fence.jpg"></a></p>
14544
14545 <blockquote>
14546 «They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
14547 safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.» - Benjamin Franklin
14548 </blockquote>
14549
14550 <p>Do you feel safe at the airport?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when
14551 you see a surveillance camera?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when you
14552 leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions?  I do not.  I
14553 just remember <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon">the
14554 Panopticon</a>, and can not help to think that we are slowly
14555 transforming our society to a huge Panopticon on our own.</p>
14556
14557       </div>
14558       <div class="tags">
14559
14560
14561         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>.
14562
14563
14564       </div>
14565     </div>
14566     <div class="padding"></div>
14567
14568     <div class="entry">
14569       <div class="title">
14570         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html">ColonHelp produser sue WordPress to silence critic</a>
14571       </div>
14572       <div class="date">
14573         12th October 2012
14574       </div>
14575       <div class="body">
14576         <p>Thanks to a blog post by
14577 <a href="http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.no/2012/10/a-shitstorm-is-comming.html">Eddy
14578 Petrișor</a>, I became aware of yet another "alternative medicine"
14579 company using legal intimidation tactics to scare off critics.
14580 According to the originating blog post about the detox "cure"
14581 <a href="http://insulaindoielii.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/colon-help-sues-wordpress/">ColonHelp
14582 and its producers Zenyth Pharmaceuticals actions</a>, the producer
14583 sues Wordpress to get rid of the critical information.  To check if
14584 the story was for real, I contacted Automattic, the company behind
14585 wordpress.com, and they reply was "We can confirm that Zenyth is
14586 seeking a court order against WordPress / Automattic.  However, we
14587 don't believe the Terms of Service have been violated in this
14588 matter".</p>
14589
14590 <p>The story seem to be simply that a blogger checked the scientific
14591 foundation for a popular health product in Rumania, ColonHelp, and
14592 reported that there was no reason at all to believe it improved the
14593 health of its users.  This caused the company behind the product,
14594 Zenyth Pharmaceuticals, to use legal intimidation to try to silence
14595 the critic, instead of presenting its views and scientific foundation
14596 to argue its side.</p>
14597
14598 <p>This is the usual story, and the Zenyth Pharmaceuticals company
14599 deserve everyone to know how it failed to act properly.  Lets hope the
14600 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect">Streisand
14601 effect</a> can make it rethink its strategy.</p>
14602
14603 <p>What is the harm, you might think.  I suggest you take a look at
14604 <a href="http://www.whatstheharm.net/detoxification.html">a list of
14605 victims of detoxification</a>.</p>
14606
14607       </div>
14608       <div class="tags">
14609
14610
14611         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>.
14612
14613
14614       </div>
14615     </div>
14616     <div class="padding"></div>
14617
14618     <div class="entry">
14619       <div class="title">
14620         <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>
14621       </div>
14622       <div class="date">
14623          3rd October 2012
14624       </div>
14625       <div class="body">
14626         <p>I just read the blog post from Tim Retout
14627 <a href="http://retout.co.uk/blog/2012/10/02/the-library-challenge">about
14628 the computer science book collection available in his local
14629 library</a>, and just wanted to share my comment on his theory about
14630 computer books becoming obsolete so soon.  That is part of the reason
14631 why the selection is so sad in almost any local library (it is in mine
14632 too), but I believe the major contributing factor is that the people
14633 buying books to the library have no way to know a good and future
14634 computer classic from trash.  And they need to know which one will
14635 become a classic in the future, as they would normally buy one of the
14636 recently published books.</p>
14637
14638 <p>During my university years, I worked for a while at the university
14639 library, and even there the person in charge of buying computer
14640 related books (and in fact any natural science related book), did not
14641 know enough about computers to make a good educated guess.  Once, just
14642 before Christmas, they had some leftover money on the book budget and
14643 I was asked if I could pick out a lot of computer books in the
14644 university book store, for the library to buy for their collection.  I
14645 had a great time picking all the books I dreamt of buying and reading,
14646 and the books I knew were classics (like most of the
14647 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens">Stevens
14648 collection</a>).  I picked several of the generic O'Reilly books (ie
14649 documenting protocols, formats and systems, not specific versions of
14650 products) and stayed away from the 'teach yourself X in N days' class.
14651 I had a great time, and probably picked out more than a hundred books
14652 for the library that evening.</p>
14653
14654 <p>The sad fact is that there is no way a overworked librarian is
14655 going to know that for example
14656 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming">The
14657 Practice of Programming</a> is a must-have in any computer library,
14658 and they will most of the time end up picking the wrong books to buy.
14659 Perhaps you can help your local library make better choices by giving
14660 the suggestions for books to get?  I know they would love to hear from
14661 you, even if their budget might block them from getting your favourite
14662 book right away.</p>
14663
14664       </div>
14665       <div class="tags">
14666
14667
14668         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14669
14670
14671       </div>
14672     </div>
14673     <div class="padding"></div>
14674
14675     <div class="entry">
14676       <div class="title">
14677         <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>
14678       </div>
14679       <div class="date">
14680         23rd September 2012
14681       </div>
14682       <div class="body">
14683         <p>Since this summer, I have worked in my spare time on a Norwegian <a
14684 href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book <a
14685 href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
14686 The reason is that this book is a great primer on what problems exist
14687 in the current copyright laws, and I want it to be available also for
14688 those that are reluctant do read an English book.
14689
14690 When I started, I
14691 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
14692 for volunteers</a> to help me, but too few have volunteered so far,
14693 and progress is a bit slow.  Anyway, today I broken the 70 percent
14694 mark for the first rough translation.  At the moment, less than 700
14695 strings (paragraphs, index terms, titles) are left to translate.  With
14696 my current progress of 10-20 strings per day, it will take a while to
14697 complete the translation.  This graph show the updated progress:</p>
14698
14699 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
14700
14701 <p>Progress have slowed down lately due to family and work
14702 commitments.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out
14703 the project files currently available from
14704 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
14705
14706 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
14707 the updated
14708 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
14709 and
14710 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
14711 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
14712 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
14713 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
14714
14715       </div>
14716       <div class="tags">
14717
14718
14719         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>.
14720
14721
14722       </div>
14723     </div>
14724     <div class="padding"></div>
14725
14726     <div class="entry">
14727       <div class="title">
14728         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html">Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda</a>
14729       </div>
14730       <div class="date">
14731         17th September 2012
14732       </div>
14733       <div class="body">
14734         <p>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
14735 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
14736 community, I finally found time to wrap up another.  This time it is
14737 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
14738 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
14739 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
14740 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.</p>
14741
14742 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
14743
14744 <p>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
14745 in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
14746 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
14747 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
14748 IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
14749 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
14750 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
14751 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
14752 training is anyway very important</p>
14753
14754 <p>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
14755 <a href="http://www.spse.ch/">SPSE school</a> (secondary) is a very
14756 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
14757 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
14758 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
14759
14760 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
14761 project?</strong></p>
14762
14763 <p>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
14764 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
14765 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
14766 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
14767 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
14768 hole.</p>
14769
14770 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
14771 Edu?</strong></p>
14772
14773 <p>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
14774 very generous for help and hints.  Chat help is crucial, together with
14775 the mailing list.  Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
14776 engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
14777 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
14778 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
14779 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
14780 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
14781 hassle.</p>
14782
14783 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
14784 Edu?</strong></p>
14785
14786 <p>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
14787 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
14788 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
14789 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
14790 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
14791 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
14792 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
14793 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)</p>
14794
14795 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
14796
14797 <p>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
14798 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
14799 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
14800 <a href="http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html">Perceus</a>
14801 has the same...</p>
14802
14803 <p>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
14804 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
14805 something breaks.  Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
14806 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.</p>
14807
14808 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
14809 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
14810
14811 <P>I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
14812 cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
14813 just because they are normally not open to change.</p>
14814
14815 <p>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
14816 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
14817 don't.</p>
14818
14819 <p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
14820 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
14821 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
14822 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
14823 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
14824 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
14825 Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>
14826
14827       </div>
14828       <div class="tags">
14829
14830
14831         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>.
14832
14833
14834       </div>
14835     </div>
14836     <div class="padding"></div>
14837
14838     <div class="entry">
14839       <div class="title">
14840         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html">IETF activity to standardise video codec</a>
14841       </div>
14842       <div class="date">
14843         15th September 2012
14844       </div>
14845       <div class="body">
14846         <p>After the
14847 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">Opus
14848 codec made</a> it into <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> as
14849 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716</a>, I had a look
14850 to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
14851 too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
14852 area.  A non-"working group" mailing list
14853 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec">video-codec</a>
14854 was
14855 <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
14856 formal working group should be formed.</p>
14857
14858 <p>I look forward to see how this plays out.  There is already
14859 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/video-codec/current/msg00003.html">an
14860 email from someone</a> in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
14861 participate in the ISO group.  Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
14862 that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
14863 multimedia formats requiring royalty payments, I suspect
14864 joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
14865 involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.</p>
14866
14867 <p>If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
14868 join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
14869 IETF.</p>
14870
14871       </div>
14872       <div class="tags">
14873
14874
14875         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>.
14876
14877
14878       </div>
14879     </div>
14880     <div class="padding"></div>
14881
14882     <div class="entry">
14883       <div class="title">
14884         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">IETF standardize its first multimedia codec: Opus</a>
14885       </div>
14886       <div class="date">
14887         12th September 2012
14888       </div>
14889       <div class="body">
14890         <p>Yesterday, <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> announced the
14891 publication of of
14892 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716, the Definition
14893 of the Opus Audio Codec</a>, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec
14894 intended for both VoIP, film and music.  This is the first time, as
14895 far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec.  In
14896 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3533">RFC 3533</a>, IETF
14897 standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great
14898 royalty free container for audio, video and movies.  I hope IETF will
14899 continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG
14900 have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish
14901 multimedia content on the Internet.</p>
14902
14903 <p>IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to
14904 ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty
14905 free specifications.  Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and
14906 poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet.</p>
14907
14908 <p>Visit the <a href="http://opus-codec.org/">Opus project page</a> if
14909 you want to learn more about the solution.</p>
14910
14911       </div>
14912       <div class="tags">
14913
14914
14915         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>.
14916
14917
14918       </div>
14919     </div>
14920     <div class="padding"></div>
14921
14922     <div class="entry">
14923       <div class="title">
14924         <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>
14925       </div>
14926       <div class="date">
14927          7th September 2012
14928       </div>
14929       <div class="body">
14930         <p>As I
14931 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
14932 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
14933 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
14934 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
14935 repository for the project</a>.</p>
14936
14937 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
14938 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
14939 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
14940 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
14941
14942 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
14943 PostScript formats at
14944 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
14945 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
14946
14947       </div>
14948       <div class="tags">
14949
14950
14951         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>.
14952
14953
14954       </div>
14955     </div>
14956     <div class="padding"></div>
14957
14958     <div class="entry">
14959       <div class="title">
14960         <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>
14961       </div>
14962       <div class="date">
14963         23rd August 2012
14964       </div>
14965       <div class="body">
14966         <p>I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how
14967 <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsoft-was-forced-open-office-200233">Microsoft
14968 have been forced to open Office</a>, and it made me remember and
14969 revisit the great site
14970 <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">officeshots</a> which allow you
14971 to check out how different programs present the ODF file format.  I
14972 recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)</p>
14973
14974       </div>
14975       <div class="tags">
14976
14977
14978         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>.
14979
14980
14981       </div>
14982     </div>
14983     <div class="padding"></div>
14984
14985     <div class="entry">
14986       <div class="title">
14987         <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>
14988       </div>
14989       <div class="date">
14990         17th August 2012
14991       </div>
14992       <div class="body">
14993         <p>In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian
14994 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
14995 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
14996 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law
14997 I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an
14998 English book.  It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever
14999 expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society.  When the
15000 translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy
15001 to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down
15002 to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law.  This
15003 summer I
15004 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
15005 for volunteers</a> to help me, and I have been able to secure the
15006 valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.</p>
15007
15008 <p>Two days ago, we finally broke the 50% mark.  Then more than 50% of
15009 the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also
15010 titles and index entries are also counted).  All parts from the
15011 beginning up to and including chapter four is translated.  So is
15012 chapters six, seven and the conclusion.  I created a graph to show the
15013 progress:</p>
15014
15015 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
15016
15017 <p>The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index
15018 entries into the docbook.  They were missing with the docbook version
15019 I initially started with.  There are still quite a few index entries
15020 missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done.  I
15021 currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete
15022 english version of the docbook source.</p>
15023
15024 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
15025 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
15026 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
15027 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
15028 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
15029 around?  I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to
15030 me.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the
15031 project files currently available from <a
15032 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
15033
15034 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
15035 the updated
15036 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
15037 and
15038 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
15039 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
15040 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
15041 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
15042
15043       </div>
15044       <div class="tags">
15045
15046
15047         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>.
15048
15049
15050       </div>
15051     </div>
15052     <div class="padding"></div>
15053
15054     <div class="entry">
15055       <div class="title">
15056         <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>
15057       </div>
15058       <div class="date">
15059         10th August 2012
15060       </div>
15061       <div class="body">
15062         <p>In <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> one can specify
15063 the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
15064 this information to pick the correct translations for 'chapter', 'see
15065 also', 'index' etc.  And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
15066 this work just fine.  For example a German user can start the document
15067 with &lt;book lang="de"&gt;, and the document will show up with the
15068 correct content with any of the docbook processors.  This is not the
15069 case for the language
15070 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">I
15071 am working with at the moment</a>, Norwegian Bokmål.</p>
15072
15073 <p>For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
15074 because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
15075 all tools.  I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
15076 dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way.  Some
15077 of them do not handle it at all.</p>
15078
15079 <p>A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
15080 this mess.  Norwegian is not one, but two written variants.  The
15081 variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål.  There are three
15082 two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
15083 is 'no', Norwegian Nynorsk is 'nn' and Norwegian Bokmål is 'nb'.
15084 Historically the 'no' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
15085 many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
15086 is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
15087 In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure 'no' was an
15088 alias for 'nb'.</p>
15089
15090 <p>Back to docbook processing tools in Debian.  The dblatex tool only
15091 understand 'nn'.  There are translations for 'no', but not 'nb' (BTS
15092 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/684391">#684391</a>), but due to a bug
15093 (BTS <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">#682936</a>) the 'no'
15094 language code is not recognised.  The docbook-xsl tool chain only
15095 recognise 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The xmlto tool only recognise
15096 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The end result that there is no language
15097 code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
15098 at the same time. :(</p>
15099
15100 <p>The correct solution is to use &lt;book lang="nb"&gt;, but it will
15101 take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
15102 processors. :(</p>
15103
15104 <p>Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/</p>
15105
15106       </div>
15107       <div class="tags">
15108
15109
15110         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>.
15111
15112
15113       </div>
15114     </div>
15115     <div class="padding"></div>
15116
15117     <div class="entry">
15118       <div class="title">
15119         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html">Best way to create a docbook book?</a>
15120       </div>
15121       <div class="date">
15122         31st July 2012
15123       </div>
15124       <div class="body">
15125         <p>I tried to send this text to the
15126 <a href="https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/">docbook-apps
15127 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org</a>, but it only accept messages
15128 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
15129 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
15130 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
15131 out.</p>
15132
15133 <p>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
15134 learning curve at the moment.</p>
15135
15136 <p>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
15137 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
15138 docbook to handle the process.  The files to build the book are
15139 available from
15140 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.
15141 The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
15142 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
15143 software docbook processors.  My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
15144 Squeeze.</p>
15145
15146 <p>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
15147 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
15148 formats.  I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
15149 problems.</p>
15150
15151 <ul>
15152
15153 <li>Using dblatex, the &lt;part&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
15154    as &lt;/part&gt; do not really end the &lt;part&gt;. (See
15155    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683166">BTS report #683166</a>), the
15156    xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
15157    index references spanning several pages (See
15158    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682901">BTS report #682901</a>), and
15159    I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
15160    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">BTS report #682936</a>).</li>
15161
15162 <li>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
15163    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683163">BTS report
15164    #683163</a>).</li>
15165
15166 <li>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
15167    show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
15168    footnote and text body, see
15169    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683197">BTS report #683197</a>), and
15170    fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
15171    refs listed are not right).</li>
15172
15173 <li>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.</li>
15174
15175 <li>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
15176    index problems the xmlto + fop processing.</li>
15177
15178 </ul>
15179
15180 <p>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
15181 of this book?  Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
15182 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?</p>
15183
15184 <p>What about HTML and EPUB versions?</p>
15185
15186       </div>
15187       <div class="tags">
15188
15189
15190         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>.
15191
15192
15193       </div>
15194     </div>
15195     <div class="padding"></div>
15196
15197     <div class="entry">
15198       <div class="title">
15199         <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>
15200       </div>
15201       <div class="date">
15202         21st July 2012
15203       </div>
15204       <div class="body">
15205         <p>I reported earlier that I am working on
15206 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">a
15207 norwegian version</a> of the book
15208 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
15209 Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
15210 Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six.  The source files as well as a
15211 PDF and EPUB version of this book are available from
15212 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
15213
15214 <p>I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
15215 (preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
15216 completely translated.  This completes 26 percent of the number of
15217 strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus 74
15218 percent left to translate.  A graph of the progress is present at the
15219 bottom of the github project page.  There is still room for more
15220 contributors.  Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
15221 you got time and are willing to help make this book make it to
15222 print. :)</p>
15223
15224 <p>The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
15225 translations, if you want the book to be available in your
15226 language.</p>
15227
15228       </div>
15229       <div class="tags">
15230
15231
15232         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>.
15233
15234
15235       </div>
15236     </div>
15237     <div class="padding"></div>
15238
15239     <div class="entry">
15240       <div class="title">
15241         <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>
15242       </div>
15243       <div class="date">
15244         16th July 2012
15245       </div>
15246       <div class="body">
15247         <p>I am currently working on a
15248 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">project
15249 to translate</a> the book
15250 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig
15251 to Norwegian.  And the source we base our translation on is the
15252 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook">docbook</a> version, to
15253 allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
15254 this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
15255 tagged.  The source files of this project is available from
15256 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
15257
15258 <p>The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
15259 no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert.  Is there a
15260 docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
15261 well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
15262 for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book?  This will provide a
15263 well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
15264 easier for us to create a good Norwegian version.  If you can and want
15265 to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
15266 send pull requests with fixes. :)</p>
15267
15268       </div>
15269       <div class="tags">
15270
15271
15272         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>.
15273
15274
15275       </div>
15276     </div>
15277     <div class="padding"></div>
15278
15279     <div class="entry">
15280       <div class="title">
15281         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html">Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg</a>
15282       </div>
15283       <div class="date">
15284          9th July 2012
15285       </div>
15286       <div class="body">
15287         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
15288 Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
15289 recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
15290 country Sweden.  This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
15291 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
15292 to adjust and scale the just released
15293 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
15294 Wheezy</a> setup to his liking.  He granted me an interview, and I am
15295 happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
15296
15297 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
15298
15299 <p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
15300 the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
15301 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
15302 "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups.  In
15303 Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
15304 in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
15305 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
15306 perspective when working with IT.</p>
15307
15308 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
15309 project?</strong></p>
15310
15311 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
15312 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
15313 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
15314 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
15315 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
15316 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
15317
15318 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
15319 Edu?</strong></p>
15320
15321 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
15322 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
15323 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
15324 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
15325 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
15326 well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
15327 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
15328 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
15329 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
15330 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
15331 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
15332 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
15333 thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
15334 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
15335 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
15336 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
15337 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
15338 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time.  Our
15339 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
15340 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
15341 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
15342 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
15343 quicker to update.
15344
15345 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
15346 Edu?</strong></p>
15347
15348 <p>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
15349 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
15350 year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
15351 sound from working with them.  It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
15352 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
15353 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
15354
15355 <p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
15356 install time.  In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
15357 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
15358 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
15359 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
15360 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
15361 support for single-sign on.  That will make the transition to free
15362 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
15363 need.  No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
15364 some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
15365 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes.  We run a journalist
15366 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
15367 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association).  Our
15368 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
15369 are done.  This is important if you want to get a job.</p>
15370
15371 <p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
15372 magazines.  We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
15373 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
15374 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
15375 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
15376 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
15377 edit and compile a newspaper.  But politically at our school we are not
15378 there yet.  And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
15379
15380 <p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
15381 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
15382 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
15383 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
15384 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
15385 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
15386 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
15387 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise.  Those
15388 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
15389 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
15390 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
15391 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
15392 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
15393 sound file.</p>
15394
15395 <p>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
15396 will try.  The problem is the students have certain expectations when
15397 they start an education towards a profession.  So the programs has to
15398 look and feel professional.  Good thing with radio, there are many
15399 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
15400 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
15401 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
15402 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
15403 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
15404
15405 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
15406
15407 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days.  I use almost
15408 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
15409 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
15410 )</p>
15411
15412 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
15413 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
15414
15415 <p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
15416 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
15417 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
15418 flawlessly.  The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
15419 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
15420 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
15421 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
15422 idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
15423 the administration.  It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
15424 open source, if the principal has to run Windows.  It also creates a
15425 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
15426 will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
15427 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
15428 desktop is essential.  At least at our school, where we have mixed
15429 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
15430
15431 <p>Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
15432 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
15433 article <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/">Radio station
15434 management with Airtime</a>,
15435 <a href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/">Airtime</a> which
15436 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
15437 <a href="http://www.rivendellaudio.org/">Rivendell</a> which claim to
15438 be complete radio broadcast automation solution.  All of them seem
15439 useful to the aspiring radio producer.</p>
15440
15441       </div>
15442       <div class="tags">
15443
15444
15445         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>.
15446
15447
15448       </div>
15449     </div>
15450     <div class="padding"></div>
15451
15452     <div class="entry">
15453       <div class="title">
15454         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html">Why do schools waste money on IT?</a>
15455       </div>
15456       <div class="date">
15457          8th July 2012
15458       </div>
15459       <div class="body">
15460         <p>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
15461 of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
15462 in schools and municipalities.  We provide what the happy users of
15463 Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
15464 alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution.  I
15465 was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
15466 Steinberg in his blog post
15467 "<a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2012/06/19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/">Can
15468 you recognize the million pound chair?</a>".  Read it and weep for the
15469 spending of your tax money.</p>
15470
15471 <p>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
15472 projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
15473 causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
15474 to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
15475 public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
15476 purchases.</p>
15477
15478       </div>
15479       <div class="tags">
15480
15481
15482         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>.
15483
15484
15485       </div>
15486     </div>
15487     <div class="padding"></div>
15488
15489     <div class="entry">
15490       <div class="title">
15491         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html">Free Timetabling Software - nice free software</a>
15492       </div>
15493       <div class="date">
15494          7th July 2012
15495       </div>
15496       <div class="body">
15497         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
15498 Skolelinux</a> is a large collection of end user and school specific
15499 software.  It is one of the packages not installed by default but
15500 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
15501 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
15502 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
15503 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
15504 receive.  The software is
15505
15506 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/">named FET</a>, and it provide a
15507 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
15508 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
15509 both teachers and students.  It is available both for
15510 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html">Linux, MacOSX and
15511 Windows</a>.</p>
15512
15513 <p>This is <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html">the
15514 feature list</a>, liftet from the project web site:</p>
15515
15516 <p><ul>
15517
15518   <li>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
15519     You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it </li>
15520
15521   <li>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
15522     (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
15523     (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
15524     (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
15525     (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
15526     (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
15527     sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
15528     (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
15529     </li>
15530
15531   <li>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
15532     semi-automatic or manual allocation</li>
15533
15534   <li>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
15535     GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports </li>
15536
15537   <li>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
15538     with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)</li>
15539
15540   <li>Import/export from CSV format</li>
15541
15542   <li>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
15543     formats </li>
15544
15545   <li>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
15546     and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
15547     non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
15548     (as separate sets)</li>
15549
15550   <li>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
15551     (but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
15552     percentage)</li>
15553
15554   <li>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
15555     demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
15556     memory):
15557     <ul>
15558       <li>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60</li>
15559       <li>Maximum number of working days per week: 35</li>
15560       <li>Maximum total number of teachers: 6000</li>
15561       <li>Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000</li>
15562       <li>Maximum total number of subjects: 6000</li>
15563       <li>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags</li>
15564       <li>Maximum number of activities: 30000</li>
15565       <li>Maximum number of rooms: 6000</li>
15566       <li>Maximum number of buildings: 6000</li>
15567       <li>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
15568           students sets for each activity.  (it is possible
15569           also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
15570           activity)</li>
15571       <li>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints</li>
15572       <li>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints</li>
15573     </ul></li>
15574
15575   <li>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
15576     <ul>
15577       <li>Break periods</li>
15578       <li>For teacher(s):
15579         <ul>
15580           <li>Not available periods</li>
15581           <li>Max/min days per week</li>
15582           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
15583           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
15584           <li>Min hours daily</li>
15585           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
15586
15587           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
15588             days per week</li>
15589         </ul></li>
15590       <li>For students (sets):
15591         <ul>
15592           <li>Not available periods</li>
15593           <li>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)</li>
15594           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
15595           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
15596           <li>Min hours daily</li>
15597           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
15598
15599           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
15600             days per week</li>
15601         </ul></li>
15602       <li>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
15603         <ul>
15604           <li>A single preferred starting time</li>
15605           <li>A set of preferred starting times</li>
15606           <li>A set of preferred time slots</li>
15607           <li>Min/max days between them</li>
15608           <li>End(s) students day</li>
15609           <li>Same starting time/day/hour</li>
15610           <li>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
15611             flexible constraint, useful in many situations)</li>
15612           <li>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)</li>
15613           <li>Not overlapping</li>
15614           <li>Max simultaneous in selected time slots</li>
15615           <li>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities</li>
15616         </ul></li>
15617     </ul></li>
15618
15619   <li>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
15620     <ul>
15621       <li>Room not available periods</li>
15622       <li>For teacher(s):
15623         <ul>
15624           <li>Home room(s)</li>
15625           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
15626           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
15627         </ul>
15628       </li>
15629
15630       <li>For students (sets):
15631         <ul>
15632           <li>Home room(s)</li>
15633           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
15634           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
15635         </ul>
15636       </li>
15637       <li>Preferred room(s):
15638         <ul>
15639           <li>For a subject</li>
15640           <li>For an activity tag</li>
15641           <li>For a subject and an activity tag</li>
15642           <li>Individually for a (sub)activity</li>
15643         </ul>
15644       </li>
15645
15646       <li>For a set of activities:
15647         <ul>
15648           <li>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms</li>
15649         </ul>
15650       </li>
15651     </ul>
15652   </li>
15653 </ul></p>
15654
15655 <p>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
15656 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it.  If you
15657 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
15658 manually, check it out.
15659
15660 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
15661 <a href="http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/2012/03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/">a
15662 blog post from MarvelSoft</a>.  If you find FET useful, please provide
15663 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
15664 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos">Debian Edu HowTo
15665 section</a>.</p>
15666
15667       </div>
15668       <div class="tags">
15669
15670
15671         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
15672
15673
15674       </div>
15675     </div>
15676     <div class="padding"></div>
15677
15678     <div class="entry">
15679       <div class="title">
15680         <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>
15681       </div>
15682       <div class="date">
15683          3rd July 2012
15684       </div>
15685       <div class="body">
15686         <p>In the NUUG <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a>
15687 project (Norwegian version of
15688 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> from
15689 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>), we have discovered
15690 a problem with the municipalities using
15691 <a href="http://www.zimbra.com/">Zimbra</a>.  When FiksGataMi send a
15692 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
15693 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
15694 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address.  The intention is to make
15695 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
15696 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
15697 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
15698 Zimbra.  Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
15699 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
15700 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
15701 the From: header.</p>
15702
15703 <p>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
15704 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
15705 problem.  We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
15706 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
15707 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports.  We have been in
15708 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
15709 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
15710 behaviour.</p>
15711
15712 <p>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
15713 to the specification in RFC 3834, which recommend that vacation
15714 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
15715 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
15716 differently.  Anyone know?  Please let us know at
15717 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
15718 (at) nuug.no</a>.</p>
15719
15720       </div>
15721       <div class="tags">
15722
15723
15724         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>.
15725
15726
15727       </div>
15728     </div>
15729     <div class="padding"></div>
15730
15731     <div class="entry">
15732       <div class="title">
15733         <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>
15734       </div>
15735       <div class="date">
15736         26th June 2012
15737       </div>
15738       <div class="body">
15739         <p>I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
15740 another interview with the people behind
15741 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
15742 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
15743 helpers from Spain.  His effort was the reason we added support for
15744 several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
15745 Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
15746 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
15747 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
15748
15749 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
15750
15751 <p>I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
15752 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
15753 ICT in schools</p>
15754
15755 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
15756 project?</strong></p>
15757
15758 <p>At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
15759 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
15760 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
15761 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.</p>
15762
15763 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
15764 Edu?</strong></p>
15765
15766 <p>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
15767 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
15768 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
15769 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.</p>
15770
15771 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
15772 Edu?</strong></p>
15773
15774 <p>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
15775 economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
15776 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
15777 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
15778 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
15779 technologies in school.</p>
15780
15781 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
15782
15783 <p>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
15784 between Iceweasel, <a href="http://www.geany.org/">Geany</a> and
15785 <a href="http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator">Terminator</a>.</p>
15786
15787 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
15788 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
15789
15790 <p>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
15791 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
15792 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
15793 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.</p>
15794
15795 <p>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
15796 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
15797 universities. So different strategies are needed.</p>
15798
15799 <p>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
15800 we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
15801 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
15802 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
15803 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
15804 using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
15805 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
15806 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
15807 working there.</p>
15808
15809       </div>
15810       <div class="tags">
15811
15812
15813         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>.
15814
15815
15816       </div>
15817     </div>
15818     <div class="padding"></div>
15819
15820     <div class="entry">
15821       <div class="title">
15822         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
15823       </div>
15824       <div class="date">
15825         24th June 2012
15826       </div>
15827       <div class="body">
15828         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
15829 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
15830 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
15831 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
15832 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
15833 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
15834 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
15835 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
15836 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
15837 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
15838 missing in my book.</p>
15839
15840 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
15841 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
15842 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
15843 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
15844 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
15845 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
15846 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
15847
15848       </div>
15849       <div class="tags">
15850
15851
15852         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>.
15853
15854
15855       </div>
15856     </div>
15857     <div class="padding"></div>
15858
15859     <div class="entry">
15860       <div class="title">
15861         <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>
15862       </div>
15863       <div class="date">
15864         11th June 2012
15865       </div>
15866       <div class="body">
15867         <p>During my work on
15868 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.nb.html">Debian Edu
15869 based on Squeeze</a>, I came across some issues that should be
15870 addressed in the Wheezy release.  I finally found time to wrap up my
15871 notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
15872 explanation.</p>
15873
15874 <p><ul>
15875
15876 <li>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
15877 changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
15878 with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
15879 system depend on tasksel tasks in
15880 /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
15881 installation.</li>
15882
15883 <li>Enable Kerberos login for more services.  Now with the Kerberos
15884 foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
15885 services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions.  We should
15886 at least try to enable it for these services:
15887 <ul>
15888
15889   <li>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
15890     quotas.</li>
15891   <li>Nagios for admins checking the system status.</li>
15892   <li>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.</li>
15893   <li>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.</li>
15894   <li>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.</li>
15895   <li>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.</li>
15896
15897 </ul></li>
15898
15899 <li>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
15900 authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
15901 use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
15902 is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind</li>
15903
15904 <li>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install.  The split made
15905 sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
15906 inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.</li>
15907
15908 <li>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
15909 touching the disk if the disk is too small.  This is
15910 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/653305">BTS report #653305</a> and the
15911 d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
15912 it and upload.  After this is done we need to adjust
15913 debian-edu-install to use this new hook.</li>
15914
15915 <li>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
15916 time config).  LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
15917 packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
15918 in Wheezy.
15919
15920 <li>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
15921 the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
15922 up KDE login on slow networks.</li>
15923
15924 <li>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
15925 change on first login.  This is useful when handing out password on
15926 paper, to make sure only the user know the password.  This require
15927 fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.</li>
15928
15929 <li>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
15930 The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
15931 familiar with GUIs.  This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
15932 have it available where the admin will be looking for it..</li>
15933
15934 <li>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
15935 actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses).  None of the
15936 Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.</li>
15937
15938 <li>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
15939 using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
15940 packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.</li>
15941
15942 <li>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
15943 when changing password using the Kerberos protocol.  The hook was
15944 requested in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/588968">BTS report
15945 #588968</a> and is now available in Wheezy.  We might need to write a
15946 MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.</li>
15947
15948 <li>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
15949 <ul>
15950
15951 <li>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers</li>
15952 <li>consider dropping xpaint</li>
15953 <li>and probably more?</li>
15954 </ul></li>
15955
15956 <li>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly.  This is
15957 mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
15958 examples too.  For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
15959 firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
15960 some GUI to do this.  Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
15961 could consider using their packages.  At the moment we have some
15962 command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
15963 for the LTSP chroot).</li>
15964
15965
15966 <li>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options.  We
15967 should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
15968 install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
15969 use.</li>
15970
15971 <li>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
15972 interesting educational packages.  We should work on the package
15973 tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
15974 packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
15975 new applications with a simple mouse click.</li>
15976
15977 <li>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
15978 with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
15979 be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
15980 filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled.  We should
15981 implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
15982 instead of the "it is documented" method of today.</li>
15983
15984 <li>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
15985 "take over" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
15986 There are at least three implementations,
15987 <a href="italc.sourceforge.net/">italc</a>,
15988 <a href="http://www.itais.net/help/en/">controlaula</a> og
15989 <a href="http://www.epoptes.org/">epoptes</a> and we should pick one of
15990 them and make it trivial to set it up in a school.  The challenges is
15991 how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
15992 and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
15993 given room.</li>
15994
15995 <li>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
15996 should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
15997 the Debian Edu network.  Not quite sure how.  Perhaps we should
15998 provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
15999 them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
16000 configuration and data with the central server.  This should be
16001 investigated.</li>
16002
16003 </ul></p>
16004
16005 <p>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
16006 version.</p>
16007
16008       </div>
16009       <div class="tags">
16010
16011
16012         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>.
16013
16014
16015       </div>
16016     </div>
16017     <div class="padding"></div>
16018
16019     <div class="entry">
16020       <div class="title">
16021         <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>
16022       </div>
16023       <div class="date">
16024          9th June 2012
16025       </div>
16026       <div class="body">
16027         <p>Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
16028 <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
16029 with face recognition</a> to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
16030 me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
16031 recognition on the TV image itself.  It could let the viewer know who
16032 is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
16033 company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
16034 evaluate what is being said and done.  That would be a feature I would
16035 be willing to pay for.</p>
16036
16037 <p>I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
16038 household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
16039 It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
16040 <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt">1984 by George
16041 Orwell</a>.</p>
16042
16043       </div>
16044       <div class="tags">
16045
16046
16047         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>.
16048
16049
16050       </div>
16051     </div>
16052     <div class="padding"></div>
16053
16054     <div class="entry">
16055       <div class="title">
16056         <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>
16057       </div>
16058       <div class="date">
16059          6th June 2012
16060       </div>
16061       <div class="body">
16062         <p>A few days ago
16063 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">I
16064 reported how to get</a> the support status out of Dell using an
16065 unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
16066 <a href="http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2012-February/045959.html">discovered
16067 by Daniel De Marco in february</a>.  Combined with my web scraping
16068 code for HP, Dell and IBM
16069 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">from
16070 2009</a>, I got inspired and wrote
16071 <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/">a
16072 web service</a> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
16073 support status and get a machine readable result back.</p>
16074
16075 <p>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
16076 output:
16077
16078 <blockquote><pre>
16079 % 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>
16080 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": ""})
16081 %
16082 </pre></blockquote>
16083
16084 <p>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
16085 support for other vendors.  The python source is available on
16086 Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.</p>
16087
16088       </div>
16089       <div class="tags">
16090
16091
16092         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>.
16093
16094
16095       </div>
16096     </div>
16097     <div class="padding"></div>
16098
16099     <div class="entry">
16100       <div class="title">
16101         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</a>
16102       </div>
16103       <div class="date">
16104          2nd June 2012
16105       </div>
16106       <div class="body">
16107         <p>Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
16108 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
16109 mailing list.  He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
16110 thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
16111 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
16112 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
16113
16114 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
16115
16116 <p>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
16117 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
16118 (Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
16119 by Angela).</p>
16120
16121 <p>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
16122 and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
16123 touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
16124 the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
16125 becoming an osteopath.</p>
16126
16127 <p>Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
16128 have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
16129 introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
16130 "IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
16131 skills with communication skills.</p>
16132
16133 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
16134 project?</strong></p>
16135
16136 <p>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
16137 "IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
16138 reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
16139 people said.  From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
16140 distributions that target being used for school networks.</p>
16141
16142 <p>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
16143 commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
16144 Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
16145 went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
16146 and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
16147 Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
16148 got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
16149 attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
16150 the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.</p>
16151
16152 <p>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
16153 people.  People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
16154 protection experts, other IT professionals.</p>
16155
16156 <p>We came to two conclusions:</p>
16157
16158 <p>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
16159 bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
16160 by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
16161 whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
16162 IT solution.  The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
16163 customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
16164 possible.  In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
16165 standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
16166 degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
16167 locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
16168 point.</p>
16169
16170 <p>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
16171 all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
16172 for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
16173 has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
16174 of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
16175 tries to provide an approach for this.</p>
16176
16177 <p>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
16178 defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
16179 Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
16180 equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
16181 teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
16182 spare time.</p>
16183
16184 <p>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
16185 networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
16186 here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
16187 teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
16188 non-existent until 2010/2011.</p>
16189
16190 <p>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
16191 class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
16192 avoidance do exist.</p>
16193
16194 <p>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
16195 social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
16196 for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
16197 several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
16198 they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
16199 at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
16200 and probably a gain for all.</p>
16201
16202 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16203 Edu?</strong></p>
16204
16205 <p>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
16206 any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
16207 the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
16208 workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
16209 project communication, honest communication within the group of
16210 developers, etc.</p>
16211
16212 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16213 Edu?</strong></p>
16214
16215 <p>Every coin has two sides:</p>
16216
16217 <p>Technically: <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/311188">BTS issue
16218 #311188</a>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
16219 client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
16220 should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
16221 about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
16222 several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
16223 contribute).</p>
16224
16225 <p>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
16226 find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
16227 Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
16228 promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
16229 there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
16230 these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
16231 all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
16232 meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
16233 there being rather disconnected from the development department of
16234 Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
16235
16236 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
16237
16238 <p>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.</p>
16239
16240 <p>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
16241 serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
16242 more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.</p>
16243
16244 <p>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
16245 development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
16246 PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
16247 is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.</p>
16248
16249 <p>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
16250 as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
16251 I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
16252 the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
16253 whiteboard.</p>
16254
16255 <p>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.</p>
16256
16257 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
16258 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
16259
16260 <p>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
16261 enrol people.</p>
16262
16263       </div>
16264       <div class="tags">
16265
16266
16267         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>.
16268
16269
16270       </div>
16271     </div>
16272     <div class="padding"></div>
16273
16274     <div class="entry">
16275       <div class="title">
16276         <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>
16277       </div>
16278       <div class="date">
16279          1st June 2012
16280       </div>
16281       <div class="body">
16282         <p>A few years ago I wrote
16283 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">how
16284 to extract support status</a> for your Dell and HP servers.  Recently
16285 I have learned from colleges here at the
16286 <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> that Dell have
16287 made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service.  Given
16288 the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
16289 readable information about the support status.  This perl code
16290 demonstrate how to do it:</p>
16291
16292 <p><pre>
16293 use strict;
16294 use warnings;
16295 use SOAP::Lite;
16296 use Data::Dumper;
16297 my $GUID = '11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111';
16298 my $App = 'test';
16299 my $servicetag = $ARGV[0] or die "Please supply a servicetag. $!\n";
16300 my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
16301 my $s = SOAP::Lite
16302     -> uri('http://support.dell.com/WebServices/')
16303     -> on_action( sub { join '', @_ } )
16304     -> proxy('http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx')
16305     ;
16306 my $a = $s->GetAssetInformation(
16307     SOAP::Data->name('guid')->value($GUID)->type(''),
16308     SOAP::Data->name('applicationName')->value($App)->type(''),
16309     SOAP::Data->name('serviceTags')->value($servicetag)->type(''),
16310 );
16311 print Dumper($a -> result) ;
16312 </pre></p>
16313
16314 <p>The output can look like this:</p>
16315
16316 <p><pre>
16317 $VAR1 = {
16318           'Asset' => {
16319                      'Entitlements' => {
16320                                        'EntitlementData' => [
16321                                                             {
16322                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
16323                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
16324                                                               'Provider' => '',
16325                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
16326                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
16327                                                             },
16328                                                             {
16329                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
16330                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
16331                                                               'Provider' => '',
16332                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
16333                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
16334                                                             },
16335                                                             {
16336                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
16337                                                               'EndDate' => '2007-07-29T00:00:00',
16338                                                               'Provider' => '',
16339                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
16340                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
16341                                                             }
16342                                                           ]
16343                                      },
16344                      'AssetHeaderData' => {
16345                                           'SystemModel' => 'GX620',
16346                                           'ServiceTag' => '8DSGD2J',
16347                                           'SystemShipDate' => '2006-07-29T19:00:00-05:00',
16348                                           'Buid' => '2323',
16349                                           'Region' => 'Europe',
16350                                           'SystemID' => 'PLX_GX620',
16351                                           'SystemType' => 'OptiPlex'
16352                                         }
16353                    }
16354         };
16355 </pre></p>
16356
16357 <p>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
16358 service outside the
16359 <a href="http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation">inline
16360 documentation</a>, and according to
16361 <a href="http://iboyd.net/index.php/2012/02/14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/">one
16362 comment</a> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
16363 scraping HTML pages. :)</p>
16364
16365 <p>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service.  If
16366 you know of one, drop me an email. :)</p>
16367
16368       </div>
16369       <div class="tags">
16370
16371
16372         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>.
16373
16374
16375       </div>
16376     </div>
16377     <div class="padding"></div>
16378
16379     <div class="entry">
16380       <div class="title">
16381         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html">First monitor calibration using ColorHug</a>
16382       </div>
16383       <div class="date">
16384         31st May 2012
16385       </div>
16386       <div class="body">
16387         <p>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
16388 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">ColorHug</a> arrived in the
16389 mail, and I've had a few days to test it.  As all my machines are
16390 running Debian Squeeze, where
16391 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">the
16392 calibration software</a> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
16393 I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD.  This worked
16394 just fine.  So far I have only done the quick calibration.  It was
16395 slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
16396 another day.</p>
16397
16398 <p>After calibration, I get a
16399 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile">ICC color
16400 profile</a> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
16401 tools.  KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
16402 for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
16403 xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
16404 monitor setups.  But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
16405 attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
16406 monitor.  After searching a bit, I
16407 <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347896">discovered</a>
16408 that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
16409 and a simple</p>
16410
16411 <p><pre>
16412 dispwin -d 1 profile.icc
16413 </pre></p>
16414
16415 <p>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor.  The
16416 result was a bit more pink than I expected.  I guess I picked the
16417 wrong monitor type for the "led" monitor I got, but the result is good
16418 enough for now.</p>
16419
16420       </div>
16421       <div class="tags">
16422
16423
16424         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16425
16426
16427       </div>
16428     </div>
16429     <div class="padding"></div>
16430
16431     <div class="entry">
16432       <div class="title">
16433         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html">Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter</a>
16434       </div>
16435       <div class="date">
16436         27th May 2012
16437       </div>
16438       <div class="body">
16439         <p>In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
16440 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
16441 mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
16442 up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils.  His name was Ralf
16443 Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
16444 since then, helping to make sure the
16445 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
16446 Squeeze</a> release became as good as it is..</p>
16447
16448 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
16449
16450 <p>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
16451 Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12
16452 years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
16453 also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
16454 O- or A-level ("Abitur").  For quite as long, I've been taking care of
16455 our computer network.</p>
16456
16457 <p>Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
16458 spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
16459 (4 months).</p>
16460
16461 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
16462 project?</strong></p>
16463
16464 <p>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
16465 my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
16466 very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
16467 ("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
16468 to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
16469 months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
16470 (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others.  For more
16471 than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
16472 our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
16473 approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
16474 locally installed Skolelinux image.  As a consequence, I joined quite
16475 a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
16476 (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
16477 one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.</p>
16478
16479 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16480 Edu?</strong></p>
16481
16482 <p>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
16483 project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
16484 the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
16485 computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
16486 free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
16487 up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
16488 labs).  Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
16489 administration costs tend towards zero.</p>
16490
16491 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16492 Edu?</strong></p>
16493
16494 <p>While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
16495 might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
16496 budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
16497 supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
16498 office packages or desktop environments.  These schools have the
16499 option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
16500 capacity to do so.  Another issue is that Debian release cycles
16501 include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
16502 power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
16503 within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
16504 the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
16505 i.e. harder to understand for novices.</p>
16506
16507 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
16508
16509 <p>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
16510 KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
16511 PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)</p>
16512
16513 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
16514 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
16515
16516 <p><ol>
16517
16518 <li>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
16519 people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
16520 difference between proprietary software products, and free software
16521 developing.</li>
16522
16523 <li>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
16524 there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
16525 licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
16526 privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
16527 share among German Skolelinux schools.</li>
16528
16529 <li>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
16530 trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
16531 decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.</li>
16532
16533 <li>Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
16534 free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
16535 general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
16536 shared world wide (school books e.g.).</li>
16537
16538 <li>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
16539 office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't
16540 need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.</li>
16541
16542 <li>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.</li>
16543
16544 <li>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
16545 for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
16546 Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials.  And
16547 keep sending documents in ODF formats.</li>
16548
16549 </ol></p>
16550
16551       </div>
16552       <div class="tags">
16553
16554
16555         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>.
16556
16557
16558       </div>
16559     </div>
16560     <div class="padding"></div>
16561
16562     <div class="entry">
16563       <div class="title">
16564         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html">The cost of ODF and OOXML</a>
16565       </div>
16566       <div class="date">
16567         26th May 2012
16568       </div>
16569       <div class="body">
16570         <p>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
16571 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
16572 government.  I just sent him an email to let him know that his
16573 assumption are most likely wrong.  Sharing it here in case some of my
16574 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.</p>
16575
16576 <p><blockquote> <p>Hi.  I just noted your
16577 <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>
16578 comment:</p>
16579
16580 <p><blockquote>"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
16581 with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the
16582 savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the
16583 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take
16584 it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."
16585 </blockquote></p>
16586
16587 <p>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated.  I believe it is
16588 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
16589 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
16590 at the content.  In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
16591 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
16592 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
16593 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
16594 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
16595 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver.  In
16596 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
16597 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
16598 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
16599 of wasted effort.</p>
16600
16601 <p>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
16602 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
16603 minutes converting to ODF. :)</p>
16604
16605 <p>See
16606 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php</a>
16607 and
16608 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php</a>
16609 for background information.  Norwegian only, sorry. :)</p>
16610 </blockquote></p>
16611
16612       </div>
16613       <div class="tags">
16614
16615
16616         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>.
16617
16618
16619       </div>
16620     </div>
16621     <div class="padding"></div>
16622
16623     <div class="entry">
16624       <div class="title">
16625         <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>
16626       </div>
16627       <div class="date">
16628         18th May 2012
16629       </div>
16630       <div class="body">
16631         <p>In january, I
16632 <a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2012/01/17/colorhug-has-arrived/">discovered
16633 the ColorHug</a>, a USB dongle from
16634 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">Hughski</a> to calibrate
16635 the color on a computer screen.  The software required is
16636 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">included
16637 in Debian</a>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
16638 batch.  Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
16639 opportunity to order.  Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
16640 delivery.  I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
16641 should go in the mail on monday. :)</p>
16642
16643 <p>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
16644 colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
16645 drivers. :)</p>
16646
16647       </div>
16648       <div class="tags">
16649
16650
16651         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16652
16653
16654       </div>
16655     </div>
16656     <div class="padding"></div>
16657
16658     <div class="entry">
16659       <div class="title">
16660         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html">Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner</a>
16661       </div>
16662       <div class="date">
16663         13th May 2012
16664       </div>
16665       <div class="body">
16666         <p>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
16667 publish another interview with the people behind
16668 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
16669 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
16670 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
16671 details get right before release.
16672
16673 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
16674
16675 <p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
16676 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany.  I worked nearly 20 years as
16677 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
16678 international company for machinery and equipment.  Since 2011 I'm a
16679 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
16680 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer.  From April this year
16681 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
16682 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
16683
16684 <p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
16685 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
16686 home since 2006.</p>
16687
16688 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
16689 project?</strong></p>
16690
16691 <p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
16692 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
16693 middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
16694 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
16695 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
16696 computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>
16697
16698 <p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
16699 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
16700 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
16701 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
16702 and with a lot of fun.  About one year later the school was connected
16703 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
16704 building.  That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
16705 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
16706 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
16707 costs for things like licence and software.  So I searched for a
16708 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
16709 people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
16710 prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school.  I
16711 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
16712 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
16713 Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>
16714
16715 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16716 Edu?</strong></p>
16717
16718 <p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
16719 for me as today.</p>
16720
16721 <p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
16722
16723 <p><ul>
16724
16725 <li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
16726 they had little money to spent for computers and software.</li>
16727
16728 <li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
16729 cost.</li>
16730
16731 <li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
16732 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
16733 clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
16734 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
16735 server</li>
16736
16737 <li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
16738 school.</li>
16739
16740 </ul></p>
16741
16742 <p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
16743 came up in this way:</p>
16744
16745 <p><ul>
16746
16747 <li>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
16748 now.</li>
16749
16750 <li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
16751 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
16752 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>
16753
16754 <li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
16755 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
16756 interfaces used in the past.</li>
16757
16758 <li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
16759 different needs.</li>
16760
16761 <li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>
16762
16763 <li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
16764 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
16765 is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>
16766
16767 <li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
16768 solved today by Debian Edu. </li>
16769
16770 </ul></p>
16771
16772 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16773 Edu?</strong></p>
16774
16775 <p><ul>
16776
16777 <li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
16778 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
16779 whole municipality areas.</li>
16780
16781 <li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
16782 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
16783 politicians.</li>
16784
16785 <li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
16786
16787 </ul></p>
16788
16789 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
16790
16791 <p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
16792 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
16793 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
16794 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
16795 need from the KDE environment.  On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
16796 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>
16797
16798 <p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
16799 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
16800 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
16801 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
16802 and the whole family.  I probably forgot something.</p>
16803
16804 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
16805 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
16806
16807 <p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
16808 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
16809 countries and areas all over the world.</p>
16810
16811       </div>
16812       <div class="tags">
16813
16814
16815         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>.
16816
16817
16818       </div>
16819     </div>
16820     <div class="padding"></div>
16821
16822     <div class="entry">
16823       <div class="title">
16824         <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>
16825       </div>
16826       <div class="date">
16827         30th April 2012
16828       </div>
16829       <div class="body">
16830         <p><!-- IMG_5869.JPG -->
16831 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-1611.jpeg"></p>
16832
16833 <p>I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
16834 common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
16835 But the last ones have not really been up to the task.  My last
16836 cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
16837 time, and cutting my head took forever.  And the one before that did
16838 not work very well either.  We have looked for something better for a
16839 while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
16840 discovered that there are indeed better tools available.  But these
16841 are not marketed and sold to "regular consumers".  The hair saloons
16842 can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
16843 companies.  The models they sell, are very different from the ones
16844 available from Elkjøp and Lefdal.  The main difference is their
16845 efficiency.  It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40
16846 minutes required by my impotent Braun.  The hairdresser I visited had
16847 a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
16848 producer.  But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.</p>
16849
16850 <p>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it.  This was not
16851 straight forward.  The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
16852 did not want to sell anything to me.  But searching for the model on
16853 the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
16854 around NOK 4000,-.  This was a bit much.  We kept searching and
16855 finally found a Danish supplier
16856 <a href="http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html">selling
16857 it for around NOK 1800,-</a>.  We ordered one, and it arrived a few
16858 days ago.</p>
16859
16860 <p>The instructions said it had to charge for 8 hours when we started
16861 to use it, so we left it charging over night.  Normally it will only
16862 need one hour to charge.  The following evening we successfully tested
16863 it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
16864 cutter.  The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
16865 toys.</p>
16866
16867       </div>
16868       <div class="tags">
16869
16870
16871         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16872
16873
16874       </div>
16875     </div>
16876     <div class="padding"></div>
16877
16878     <div class="entry">
16879       <div class="title">
16880         <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>
16881       </div>
16882       <div class="date">
16883         26th April 2012
16884       </div>
16885       <div class="body">
16886         <p>In <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece">an
16887 article today</a> published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
16888 <a href="http://www.urke.com/eirik/">Eirik Helland Urke</a> reports
16889 that the video editor application included with
16890 <a href="http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs">HTC One
16891 X</a> have some quite surprising terms of use.  The article is mostly
16892 based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:
16893
16894 <p><blockquote>
16895 "<a href="http://twitter.com/urke/status/194062269724897280">Drøy
16896 brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
16897 kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.</a>"
16898 </blockquote></p>
16899
16900 <p>I quickly translated it to this English message:</p>
16901
16902 <p><blockquote>
16903 "Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
16904 commercially.  Although I can ONLY use them privately."
16905 </blockquote></p>
16906
16907 <p>I've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
16908 suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
16909 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">discovered
16910 with my Canon IXUS 130</a>.  The HTC One X specification specifies that
16911 the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
16912 video.  AMR is
16913 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues">Adaptive
16914 Multi-Rate audio codec</a> with patents which according to the
16915 Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
16916 <a href="http://www.voiceage.com/">VoiceAge</a>.  MP4 is
16917 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing">MPEG4 with
16918 H.264</a>, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
16919 with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/">MPEG-LA</a>.</p>
16920
16921 <p>I know why I prefer
16922 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and open
16923 standards</a> also for video.</p>
16924
16925       </div>
16926       <div class="tags">
16927
16928
16929         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
16930
16931
16932       </div>
16933     </div>
16934     <div class="padding"></div>
16935
16936     <div class="entry">
16937       <div class="title">
16938         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html">RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory</a>
16939       </div>
16940       <div class="date">
16941         19th April 2012
16942       </div>
16943       <div class="body">
16944         <p>Here in Norway, the
16945 <a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=339"> Ministry of
16946 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs</a> is behind
16947 a <a href="http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder">directory of
16948 standards</a> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
16949 government.  When the directory was created, the people behind it made
16950 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
16951 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
16952 to the government.  Free software and non-free software could compete
16953 on the same level.</p>
16954
16955 <p>But recently, some standards with RAND
16956 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing">Reasonable
16957 And Non-Discriminatory</a>) terms have made their way into the
16958 directory.  And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
16959 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
16960 implementing them.  The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
16961 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
16962 willing to pay will get a license.  Both sound great in theory.  In
16963 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
16964 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user.  By
16965 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
16966 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
16967 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
16968 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
16969 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
16970 to implement a standard when the income available is zero.  The result
16971 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
16972 implementing standards with RAND terms.</p>
16973
16974 <p>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
16975 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
16976 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory.  Because free
16977 software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
16978 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
16979 in Norway.  The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
16980 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
16981 attention to these issues in the future.</p>
16982
16983 <p>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
16984 from Simon Phipps
16985 (<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/11/rand-not-so-reasonable/">RAND:
16986 Not So Reasonable?</a>).</p>
16987
16988 <p>Update 2012-04-21: Just came across a
16989 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm">blog
16990 post from Glyn Moody</a> over at Computer World UK warning about the
16991 same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government.  I
16992 can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
16993 <a href="http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder">the
16994 hearing taking place at the moment</a> (respond before 2012-04-27).
16995 It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
16996 specifications with RAND terms.</p>
16997
16998       </div>
16999       <div class="tags">
17000
17001
17002         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>.
17003
17004
17005       </div>
17006     </div>
17007     <div class="padding"></div>
17008
17009     <div class="entry">
17010       <div class="title">
17011         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html">Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt</a>
17012       </div>
17013       <div class="date">
17014         15th April 2012
17015       </div>
17016       <div class="body">
17017         <p>Behind <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
17018 Skolelinux</a> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
17019 setting together all the pieces.  This time I present to you Andreas
17020 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
17021 years.  He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
17022 up in the recently released
17023 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
17024 Edu Squeeze</a> version.</p>
17025
17026 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
17027
17028 <p>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany.  After
17029 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
17030 Quantum Optics.  After that I worked some years in an optics company.
17031 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
17032 teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school.  I teach math, physics,
17033 information technology and science/technology.</p>
17034
17035 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
17036 project?</strong></p>
17037
17038 <p>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
17039 project because of my interest in education and Debian.  Within the
17040 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
17041 contributing.</p>
17042
17043 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17044 Edu?</strong></p>
17045
17046 <p>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
17047 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
17048 Debian Project!</p>
17049
17050 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17051 Edu?</strong></p>
17052
17053 <p>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
17054 downside, too.  In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
17055 setup, if you need or want that.  Further more, it is not easily
17056 possible to upgrade the system to a new release.  It takes much too
17057 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
17058 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
17059 rather small and often busy elsewhere.</p>
17060
17061 <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN">Debian LAN</a>
17062 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.</p>
17063
17064 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
17065
17066 <p>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
17067 on all my machines.  For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
17068 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing.  At school I
17069 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.</p>
17070
17071 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
17072 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
17073
17074 <p>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
17075 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
17076 politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader".  The school
17077 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
17078 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats.  Even
17079 free browsers do not work for the school administration.  Publishers
17080 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.</p>
17081
17082 <p>To change this, political work is very important.  Parts of the
17083 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
17084 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
17085 the system.  There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
17086 "Free/Open Standards".  I am not sure if all the involved parties have
17087 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
17088 fraction takes them seriously.  However it might slowly make free
17089 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.</p>
17090
17091       </div>
17092       <div class="tags">
17093
17094
17095         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>.
17096
17097
17098       </div>
17099     </div>
17100     <div class="padding"></div>
17101
17102     <div class="entry">
17103       <div class="title">
17104         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html">Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</a>
17105       </div>
17106       <div class="date">
17107          8th April 2012
17108       </div>
17109       <div class="body">
17110         <p>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
17111 like <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>,
17112 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
17113 contributor to the
17114 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
17115 Edu Squeeze release manual</a>.
17116
17117 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
17118
17119 <p>I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
17120 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.</p>
17121
17122 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
17123 project?</strong></p>
17124
17125 <p>I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user!  The only
17126 reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
17127 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
17128 they'd like a native English speaker to proofread...  So I did a sweep
17129 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
17130 "localisation".</p>
17131
17132 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17133 Edu?</strong></p>
17134
17135 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17136 Edu?</strong></p>
17137
17138 <p>These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it!  In fact I
17139 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
17140 education system.</p>
17141
17142 <p>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
17143 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
17144 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
17145 money on the latest hardware.</p>
17146
17147 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
17148
17149 <p>I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
17150 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
17151 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).</p>
17152
17153 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
17154 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
17155
17156 <p>Well, I don't know.  I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
17157 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
17158 you would hardly need a strategy.</p>
17159
17160       </div>
17161       <div class="tags">
17162
17163
17164         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>.
17165
17166
17167       </div>
17168     </div>
17169     <div class="padding"></div>
17170
17171     <div class="entry">
17172       <div class="title">
17173         <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>
17174       </div>
17175       <div class="date">
17176          6th April 2012
17177       </div>
17178       <div class="body">
17179         <p>Recently I have spent time with
17180 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a> on speeding
17181 up a <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
17182 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
17183 process I discovered something very surprising.  The reason the KDE
17184 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
17185 due to the way KDE find application icons.  I discovered that showing
17186 the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
17187 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server.  Most of these were
17188
17189 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response.  Because the
17190 ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
17191 ms, the menus would be very slow.  Looking at the strace of kicker in
17192 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
17193 the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
17194 non-existing files.  KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
17195 one icon file.  In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
17196 around 230 access(2) calls.</p>
17197
17198 <p>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
17199 directories, and the list of possible directories is large.  In
17200 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
17201 and .xpm.  The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
17202 mounted.  Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
17203 requests.  I am not the first one to discover this.  I found a
17204 <a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416">KDE bug report
17205 from 2009</a> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.</p>
17206
17207 <p>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
17208 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
17209 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
17210 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
17211 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/.  Finally, I add symlinks to
17212 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
17213 for them.  This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
17214 one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
17215 almost instantaneous.  I'm not quite sure where to make the package
17216 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.</p>
17217
17218 <p>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
17219 and icon handling, but also the login process.  Not quite sure how to
17220 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
17221 that is not really an option at the moment.</p>
17222
17223 <p>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
17224 (at) lists.debian.org.</p>
17225
17226 <p>Update 2015-08-04: The
17227 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-edu/upstream/kde-icon-cache.git/">source
17228 of the scripts and associated Debian package</a> is available from the
17229 Debian Edu github repository.</p>
17230
17231       </div>
17232       <div class="tags">
17233
17234
17235         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>.
17236
17237
17238       </div>
17239     </div>
17240     <div class="padding"></div>
17241
17242     <div class="entry">
17243       <div class="title">
17244         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html">Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</a>
17245       </div>
17246       <div class="date">
17247          5th April 2012
17248       </div>
17249       <div class="body">
17250         <p>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
17251 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a> by
17252 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News.  The result was made public for
17253 non-subscribers today.  I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
17254 for schools.  Check out his article
17255 <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
17256 distribution for education</a> if you want to learn more.</p>
17257
17258       </div>
17259       <div class="tags">
17260
17261
17262         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>.
17263
17264
17265       </div>
17266     </div>
17267     <div class="padding"></div>
17268
17269     <div class="entry">
17270       <div class="title">
17271         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html">Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</a>
17272       </div>
17273       <div class="date">
17274          1st April 2012
17275       </div>
17276       <div class="body">
17277         <p>Germany is a core area for the
17278 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
17279 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
17280 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
17281
17282 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
17283
17284 <p>I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
17285 Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
17286 "<a href="http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/">Westfalen-Kolleg
17287 Dortmund</a>", a second chance school.  Here, young adults is given
17288 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
17289 examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
17290 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
17291 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.</p>
17292
17293 <p>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
17294 blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
17295 information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
17296 teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
17297 school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
17298 the end of April this year.</p>
17299
17300 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
17301 project?</strong></p>
17302
17303 <p>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
17304 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
17305 Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
17306 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
17307 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
17308 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
17309 reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
17310 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
17311 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
17312 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
17313 Skolelinux.</p>
17314
17315 <p>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
17316 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
17317 clients.  The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
17318 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
17319 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
17320 the admin teachers.</p>
17321
17322 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17323 Edu?</strong></p>
17324
17325 <p>It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
17326 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
17327 So it was a perfect choice.</p>
17328
17329 <p>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
17330 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
17331 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp.  It's of
17332 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
17333 a school and to choose where to get support for this.</p>
17334
17335 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17336 Edu?</strong></p>
17337
17338 <p>Nothing yet.</p>
17339
17340 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
17341
17342 <p>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
17343 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
17344 Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
17345 LibreOffice.</p>
17346
17347 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
17348 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
17349
17350 <p>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
17351 that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
17352 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.</p>
17353
17354       </div>
17355       <div class="tags">
17356
17357
17358         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>.
17359
17360
17361       </div>
17362     </div>
17363     <div class="padding"></div>
17364
17365     <div class="entry">
17366       <div class="title">
17367         <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>
17368       </div>
17369       <div class="date">
17370         25th March 2012
17371       </div>
17372       <div class="body">
17373         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
17374
17375 <p>The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
17376 published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
17377 to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
17378 allowing users to check their local email account without providing
17379 any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
17380 and also available from <a href="https://vimeo.com/38601767">vimeo</a>
17381 and download as a
17382 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg
17383 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
17384
17385 <p><video id="kmail-kerberos-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
17386   <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"' />
17387     <p>Download video as
17388       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
17389 </video></p>
17390
17391       </div>
17392       <div class="tags">
17393
17394
17395         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>.
17396
17397
17398       </div>
17399     </div>
17400     <div class="padding"></div>
17401
17402     <div class="entry">
17403       <div class="title">
17404         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html">Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby</a>
17405       </div>
17406       <div class="date">
17407         19th March 2012
17408       </div>
17409       <div class="body">
17410         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
17411 users are spread all across the globe.  The second inteview after
17412 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
17413 Squeeze release</a> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
17414 long time Linux user in United Kingdom.</p>
17415
17416 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
17417
17418 <p>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
17419 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
17420 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
17421 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
17422 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
17423 years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
17424 weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
17425 installations.</p>
17426
17427 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
17428 project?</strong></p>
17429
17430 <p>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
17431 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
17432 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
17433 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
17434 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
17435 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
17436 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
17437 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
17438 these things we decided to try it.</p>
17439
17440 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17441 Edu?</strong></p>
17442
17443 <p>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
17444 from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
17445 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
17446 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
17447 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
17448 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
17449 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
17450 proprietary software everywhere.</p>
17451
17452 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17453 Edu?</strong></p>
17454
17455 <p>As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
17456 how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
17457 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
17458 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
17459 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!</p>
17460
17461 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
17462
17463 <p>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
17464 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
17465 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
17466 use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
17467 that counts...)</p>
17468
17469 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
17470 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
17471
17472 <p>That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
17473 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
17474 the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
17475 applications".  However, schools today are experiencing budget
17476 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
17477 XP.  At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
17478 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
17479 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
17480 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
17481 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
17482 first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.</p>
17483
17484 <p>I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
17485 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
17486 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.</p>
17487
17488       </div>
17489       <div class="tags">
17490
17491
17492         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>.
17493
17494
17495       </div>
17496     </div>
17497     <div class="padding"></div>
17498
17499     <div class="entry">
17500       <div class="title">
17501         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html">Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu</a>
17502       </div>
17503       <div class="date">
17504         16th March 2012
17505       </div>
17506       <div class="body">
17507         <p>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
17508 it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
17509 translated versions in sync.  To do this we have come up with what we
17510 believe is a very efficient work flow.</p>
17511
17512 <ol>
17513
17514 <li>The documentation is written in a
17515 <a href="http://moinmo.in">moinmoin wiki</a> (see for example
17516 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">the
17517 Squeeze release manual</a>) with support for exporting the content as
17518 docbook XML.</li>
17519
17520 <li>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
17521 .pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
17522 with the translated text.</li>
17523
17524 <li>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
17525 which part of the original wiki document is new or changed.  They can
17526 use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
17527 the translation.  There is even a system in place to handle translated
17528 images.</li>
17529
17530 <li>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
17531 XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.</li>
17532
17533 <li>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
17534 create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.</li>
17535
17536 </ol>
17537
17538 <p>This setup work very well, but have a few issues.  The biggest
17539 issue is that <a href="http://moinmo.in/DocBook">the docbook support
17540 we use in moinmoin</a> is not actively maintained.  The docbook
17541 support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
17542 make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.</p>
17543
17544 <p>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
17545 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc">debian-edu-doc
17546 package</a>.</p>
17547
17548       </div>
17549       <div class="tags">
17550
17551
17552         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>.
17553
17554
17555       </div>
17556     </div>
17557     <div class="padding"></div>
17558
17559     <div class="entry">
17560       <div class="title">
17561         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!</a>
17562       </div>
17563       <div class="date">
17564         11th March 2012
17565       </div>
17566       <div class="body">
17567         <p>This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
17568 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> based
17569 on Debian/Squeeze.  The full announcement is
17570 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">available</a>
17571 from the project announcement list.  Now is a good time to test if it
17572 you have not done so already.</p>
17573
17574 <p>I plan to present the new version at
17575 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20120313-skolelinux/">a NUUG
17576 meeting</a> on tuesday.  I look forward to seeing you there if you are
17577 in Oslo, Norway.</p>
17578
17579       </div>
17580       <div class="tags">
17581
17582
17583         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>.
17584
17585
17586       </div>
17587     </div>
17588     <div class="padding"></div>
17589
17590     <div class="entry">
17591       <div class="title">
17592         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html">Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker</a>
17593       </div>
17594       <div class="date">
17595          9th March 2012
17596       </div>
17597       <div class="body">
17598         <p>Inspired by <a href="http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/">the
17599 interview series</a> conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
17600 interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
17601 community.  This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
17602 more international audience.</p>
17603
17604 <p>While <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
17605 Skolelinux</a> originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
17606 Europe, there are users all around the globe.  One of those far away
17607 from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
17608 and contributor.  It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
17609 work out of the box in Japan.  I got him to answer a few questions,
17610 and am happy to share the response with you. :)
17611
17612
17613 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
17614
17615 <p>My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
17616 and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
17617 Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
17618 teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
17619 Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
17620 I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
17621 primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
17622 so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
17623 also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
17624 to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
17625 appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.</p>
17626
17627 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
17628 project?</strong></p>
17629
17630 <p>In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
17631 server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
17632 samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
17633 Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I
17634 did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server"
17635 and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading
17636 there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
17637 problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
17638 previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
17639 Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
17640 downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
17641 Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
17642 my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.</p>
17643
17644 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17645 Edu?</strong></p>
17646
17647 <p>For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
17648 workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
17649 ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
17650 designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
17651 doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
17652 school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
17653 Japan.</p>
17654
17655 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17656 Edu?</strong></p>
17657
17658 <p>The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
17659 have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
17660 make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
17661 who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
17662 important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
17663 instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
17664 default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
17665 kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
17666 Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is.  A
17667 second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
17668 customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
17669 multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It
17670 took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
17671 I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
17672 help.</p>
17673
17674 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
17675
17676 <p>Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
17677 studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
17678 (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
17679 still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
17680 house, that's very useful for the family photos and music.  At school
17681 the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
17682 have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
17683 day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
17684 installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS.  We also
17685 have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
17686 and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.</p>
17687
17688 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
17689 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
17690
17691 <p>Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
17692 and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
17693 popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
17694 to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
17695 file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago.  The Edu aspect is
17696 also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
17697 Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu?  But of course the main attraction is
17698 budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
17699 compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
17700 is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
17701 are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser
17702 doesn't play flash, for example.</p>
17703
17704       </div>
17705       <div class="tags">
17706
17707
17708         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>.
17709
17710
17711       </div>
17712     </div>
17713     <div class="padding"></div>
17714
17715     <div class="entry">
17716       <div class="title">
17717         <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>
17718       </div>
17719       <div class="date">
17720          7th March 2012
17721       </div>
17722       <div class="body">
17723         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
17724
17725 <p>One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
17726 screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
17727 Debian Edu Squeeze.  The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
17728 also available from <a href="http://vimeo.com/37675399">vimeo</a> and
17729 download as a
17730 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg
17731 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
17732
17733 <p><video id="gosa-mass-user-create-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
17734   <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"' />
17735     <p>Download video as
17736       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
17737 </video></p>
17738
17739       </div>
17740       <div class="tags">
17741
17742
17743         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>.
17744
17745
17746       </div>
17747     </div>
17748     <div class="padding"></div>
17749
17750     <div class="entry">
17751       <div class="title">
17752         <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>
17753       </div>
17754       <div class="date">
17755          4th March 2012
17756       </div>
17757       <div class="body">
17758         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
17759 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
17760 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
17761 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00000.html">available</a>
17762 from the project announcement list.  Check it out if you
17763 need a software solution for your school.</p>
17764
17765       </div>
17766       <div class="tags">
17767
17768
17769         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>.
17770
17771
17772       </div>
17773     </div>
17774     <div class="padding"></div>
17775
17776     <div class="entry">
17777       <div class="title">
17778         <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>
17779       </div>
17780       <div class="date">
17781          3rd March 2012
17782       </div>
17783       <div class="body">
17784         <p>Many years ago, the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
17785 / Debian Edu project</a> initiated a student project to create a tool
17786 for making stop motion movies.  The proposal came from a teacher
17787 needing such tool on Skolelinux.  The project, called "stopmotion",
17788 was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
17789 national aware with this great project.  The project was initiated and
17790 mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
17791 and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad.  They got in touch with people at Aardman
17792 Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
17793 such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
17794 animators around the globe.  But as is usual after studying, both got
17795 jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
17796 project, and it has been lingering for a few years now.  Until last
17797 year...</p>
17798
17799 <p>Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
17800 project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
17801 name,
17802 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/">linuxstopmotion</a>.
17803 The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
17804 Internet search engines (try to search for 'stopmotion' to see what I
17805 mean). I've been following
17806 <a href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community">the
17807 mailing list</a> and the improvement already in place and planned for
17808 the future is encouraging.  If you want to make stop motion movies.
17809 Check it out. :)</p>
17810
17811       </div>
17812       <div class="tags">
17813
17814
17815         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>.
17816
17817
17818       </div>
17819     </div>
17820     <div class="padding"></div>
17821
17822     <div class="entry">
17823       <div class="title">
17824         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">Second release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
17825       </div>
17826       <div class="date">
17827         27th February 2012
17828       </div>
17829       <div class="body">
17830         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
17831 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
17832 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement did for some
17833 reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
17834 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/02/msg00015.html">available</a>
17835 from the Debian development announcement list.  Check it out if you
17836 need a software solution for your school.</p>
17837
17838       </div>
17839       <div class="tags">
17840
17841
17842         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>.
17843
17844
17845       </div>
17846     </div>
17847     <div class="padding"></div>
17848
17849     <div class="entry">
17850       <div class="title">
17851         <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>
17852       </div>
17853       <div class="date">
17854         19th February 2012
17855       </div>
17856       <div class="body">
17857         <p>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
17858 wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
17859 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
17860 on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
17861 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00001.html">available</a>
17862 on the project announcement list.  Check it out if you need a software
17863 solution for your school.</p>
17864
17865       </div>
17866       <div class="tags">
17867
17868
17869         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>.
17870
17871
17872       </div>
17873     </div>
17874     <div class="padding"></div>
17875
17876     <div class="entry">
17877       <div class="title">
17878         <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>
17879       </div>
17880       <div class="date">
17881         14th February 2012
17882       </div>
17883       <div class="body">
17884         <p>Once in a while my home server have disk problems.  Thanks to Linux
17885 Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
17886 <a href="http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/34532">I was
17887 close</a> this summer :).  But once a disk is starting to behave
17888 funny, a practical problem present itself.  How to get from the Linux
17889 device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
17890 the disk when the computer is turned off?  In my case I have SATA
17891 disks with a unique ID printed on the label.  All I need is a way to
17892 figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.</p>
17893
17894 <p>After fumbling a bit, I
17895 <a href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/">found
17896 that hdparm -I</a> will report the disk serial number, which is
17897 printed on the disk label.  The following (almost) one-liner can be
17898 used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:</p>
17899
17900 <blockquote><pre>
17901 for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep '(F)'|tr ' ' "\n"|grep '(F)'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
17902 do
17903     printf "Failed disk $d: "
17904     hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep 'Serial Num'
17905 done
17906 </blockquote></pre>
17907
17908 <p>Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
17909 next time, and in case other find it useful.</p>
17910
17911 <p>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(</p>
17912
17913 <blockquote><pre>
17914 Failed disk sdd1:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
17915 Failed disk sdd2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
17916 Failed disk sde2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1840589
17917 </blockquote></pre>
17918
17919 <p>The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
17920 labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
17921 to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
17922 remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label.  The vendor
17923 label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
17924 mounted inside my box.</p>
17925
17926 <p>I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
17927 Software RAID in the
17928 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html">nagios-plugins-standard</a>
17929 debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
17930 make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail.  At the moment
17931 it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
17932 should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
17933 disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.</p>
17934
17935       </div>
17936       <div class="tags">
17937
17938
17939         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>.
17940
17941
17942       </div>
17943     </div>
17944     <div class="padding"></div>
17945
17946     <div class="entry">
17947       <div class="title">
17948         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
17949       </div>
17950       <div class="date">
17951         13th February 2012
17952       </div>
17953       <div class="body">
17954         <p>New in the Squeeze version of
17955 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is the
17956 ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
17957 based on their environment.  We want all systems on the client to use
17958 the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from <tt>http://wpad/wpad.dat</tt>, to
17959 allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
17960 sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings.  The schools can
17961 change the global proxy setting by editing
17962 <tt>tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat</tt> and the change propagate
17963 to all Debian Edu clients in the network.</p>
17964
17965 <p>The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
17966 In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
17967 simple one, they can run arbitrary code):</p>
17968
17969 <blockquote><pre>
17970 function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
17971 {
17972    if (!isResolvable(host) ||
17973        isPlainHostName(host) ||
17974        dnsDomainIs(host, ".intern"))
17975       return "DIRECT";
17976    else
17977       return "PROXY webcache:3128; DIRECT";
17978 }
17979 </pre></blockquote>
17980
17981 <p>to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:</p>
17982
17983 <blockquote><pre>
17984 http_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
17985 ftp_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
17986 </pre></blockquote>
17987
17988 <p>To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
17989 the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
17990 would be used for
17991 <tt><a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a></tt>,
17992 and insert this extracted proxy URL in <tt>/etc/environment</tt> and
17993 <tt>/etc/apt/apt.conf</tt>.  The perl script wpad-extract work just
17994 fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
17995 javascript code is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/631045">no longer
17996 able to build</a> because the C library it depended on is now a C++
17997 library.  I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
17998 is frozen.  An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
17999 use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
18000 known alternative is known at the moment.</p>
18001
18002 <p>This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
18003 laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
18004 is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
18005 automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
18006 feature when it is connected to other networks.  And if no proxy is
18007 announced, direct connections will be used instead.</p>
18008
18009 <p>Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
18010 or security problem.  But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
18011 could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
18012 and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
18013 distinction to be academic.  If you are afraid of using the wrong
18014 proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
18015 first place.  In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
18016 ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
18017 the network setup changes.</p>
18018
18019 <p>The WPAD system is documented in a
18020 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01">IETF
18021 draft</a> and a
18022 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol">Wikipedia
18023 page</a> for those that want to learn more.</p>
18024
18025       </div>
18026       <div class="tags">
18027
18028
18029         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>.
18030
18031
18032       </div>
18033     </div>
18034     <div class="padding"></div>
18035
18036     <div class="entry">
18037       <div class="title">
18038         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Saving_power_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_using_shutdown_at_night.html">Saving power with Debian Edu / Skolelinux using shutdown-at-night</a>
18039       </div>
18040       <div class="date">
18041          5th February 2012
18042       </div>
18043       <div class="body">
18044         <p>Since the Lenny version of
18045 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, a
18046 feature to save power have been included.  It is as simple as it is
18047 practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
18048 in the morning.  This is done using the
18049 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html">shutdown-at-night</a> Debian package.</p>
18050
18051 <p>To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
18052 the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts.  For Debian Edu, this is done in
18053 LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
18054 every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and
18055 shut it down if it is.  If the hardware in question is supported by
18056 the
18057 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html">nvram-wakeup</a>
18058 package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +-
18059 10 minutes.  If this isn't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
18060 try to turn on the client.  The wake-on-lan option is only documented
18061 and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.</p>
18062
18063 <p>It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
18064 blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
18065 the common setup for a classroom.  The nvram-wakeup method only work
18066 for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock.  I've seen old
18067 machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
18068 starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot.  If you have one of
18069 those, you have to turn on the computer manually.</p>
18070
18071 <p>The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
18072 also be used outside the Debian Edu environment.  For those without a
18073 central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
18074 <tt>/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night</tt> to enable it.
18075 Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?</p>
18076
18077       </div>
18078       <div class="tags">
18079
18080
18081         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>.
18082
18083
18084       </div>
18085     </div>
18086     <div class="padding"></div>
18087
18088     <div class="entry">
18089       <div class="title">
18090         <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>
18091       </div>
18092       <div class="date">
18093          4th February 2012
18094       </div>
18095       <div class="body">
18096         <p>I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
18097 publish the third beta version of
18098 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
18099 on Squeeze.  If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
18100 out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
18101 installing new machines, check it out.  If you need a software
18102 solution for your school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
18103 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00000.html">available</a>
18104 on the project announcement list.</p>
18105
18106 <p>I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
18107 beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):</p>
18108
18109 <ul>
18110
18111 <li>It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
18112   10.0.0.0/8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
18113   the installation.</li>
18114
18115 <li>Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
18116   Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.</li>
18117
18118 <li>The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
18119   disabled queues are restarted every hour.  This should cut down on
18120   the amount of manual administration needed for printers.</li>
18121
18122 <li>The set of initial users have been changed.  Now a personal user
18123   for the local system administrator is created during installation
18124   instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
18125   and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
18126   membership.  This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
18127   up to date on the system.</li>
18128
18129 </ul>
18130
18131 <p>The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
18132 private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home.  I will use it look
18133 for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
18134 final Squeeze release is published.</p>
18135
18136 <p>Next weekend the project organise a
18137 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00001.html">developer
18138 gathering</a> in Oslo.  We will continue the work on the Squeeze
18139 version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version.  Perhaps I
18140 will see you there?</p>
18141
18142       </div>
18143       <div class="tags">
18144
18145
18146         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>.
18147
18148
18149       </div>
18150     </div>
18151     <div class="padding"></div>
18152
18153     <div class="entry">
18154       <div class="title">
18155         <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>
18156       </div>
18157       <div class="date">
18158         27th January 2012
18159       </div>
18160       <div class="body">
18161         <p>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
18162 This is the sad fact of todays computers.  In the next version of
18163 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
18164 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
18165 firmware blobs easier to handle.  The common use case I run into is a
18166 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
18167 work, but there are other use cases as well.</p>
18168
18169 <p>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
18170 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
18171 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
18172 during installation.  This take care firmware for network devices used
18173 by the installer when installing from from local media.  But for
18174 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
18175 not taken care of by this.</p>
18176
18177 <p>For non-network devices, we provide the script
18178 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
18179 search through the <tt>dmesg</tt> output for drivers requesting extra
18180 firmware.  The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
18181 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
18182 the requested firmware file(s) is installed.  I have proposed to do
18183 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
18184 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">#655507</a>), to allow PXE
18185 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better.  Run the
18186 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
18187 firmware packages.</p>
18188
18189 <p>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
18190 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
18191 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
18192 included to be able to install at all.  To fill the PXE installation
18193 initrd with extra firmware, the
18194 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware</tt> script is
18195 provided.  Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
18196 PXE initrd with firmware packages.</p>
18197
18198 <p>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
18199 network cards working.  For this,
18200 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware</tt> is
18201 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs.  It is used
18202 the same way as the other firmware related tools.</p>
18203
18204 <p>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation.  We
18205 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
18206 non-free software, and it is their choice.</p>
18207
18208 <p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
18209 try.</p>
18210
18211       </div>
18212       <div class="tags">
18213
18214
18215         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>.
18216
18217
18218       </div>
18219     </div>
18220     <div class="padding"></div>
18221
18222     <div class="entry">
18223       <div class="title">
18224         <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>
18225       </div>
18226       <div class="date">
18227         25th January 2012
18228       </div>
18229       <div class="body">
18230         <p>The next version of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu
18231 / Skolelinux</a> will include a new tool
18232 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp</tt>, which can be used to quickly set up all
18233 the computers in a school without much manual labour.  Here is a short
18234 summary on how to use it to set up a new school.</p>
18235
18236 <p>First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
18237 central server in the network.  Next, PXE boot all the client machines
18238 as thin clients and wait 5 minutes after the last client booted to
18239 allow the clients to report their existence to the central server.  When
18240 this is done, log on to the central server and run
18241 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a</tt> in the <tt>konsole</tt> to use the
18242 collected information to generate system objects in LDAP.  The output
18243 will look similar to this:</p>
18244
18245 <p><blockquote><pre>
18246 % sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
18247 info: Updating machine tjener.intern [10.0.2.2] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:05.
18248 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.
18249
18250 Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.
18251
18252 Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18253 enter password: *******
18254 %
18255 </pre></blockquote></p>
18256
18257 <p>After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
18258 root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
18259 populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
18260 automatically generated names.  The final step to set up the school is
18261 then to log into <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa</a>,
18262 the web based user, group and system administration system to change
18263 system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
18264 enable DHCP and DNS for the systems.  All clients that should be used
18265 as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
18266 group.  After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
18267 and get their assigned names and group based configuration
18268 automatically.</p>
18269
18270 <p>We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
18271 enabled this weekend.  You might want to give it a try.</p>
18272
18273 <p>Update 2012-01-28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
18274 hosts, one need to add the option -a.  I forgot to mention this in my
18275 original text, and have added it to the text now.</p>
18276
18277       </div>
18278       <div class="tags">
18279
18280
18281         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>.
18282
18283
18284       </div>
18285     </div>
18286     <div class="padding"></div>
18287
18288     <div class="entry">
18289       <div class="title">
18290         <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>
18291       </div>
18292       <div class="date">
18293         10th January 2012
18294       </div>
18295       <div class="body">
18296         <p>In the Squeeze version of
18297 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> soon
18298 to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
18299 start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
18300 all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP.  In
18301 addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
18302 are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
18303 first time.</p>
18304
18305 <p>The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
18306 labeledURI with "http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux" as the
18307 default content.  By changing this value to another URL, all users get
18308 to see the page behind this new URL.</p>
18309
18310 <p>An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool.  It can be
18311 called as "<tt>ldapvi -ZD '(cn=admin)'</tt>' to update LDAP with the
18312 new setting.</p>
18313
18314 <p>We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
18315 the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
18316 from within Iceweasel instead.</p>
18317
18318       </div>
18319       <div class="tags">
18320
18321
18322         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>.
18323
18324
18325       </div>
18326     </div>
18327     <div class="padding"></div>
18328
18329     <div class="entry">
18330       <div class="title">
18331         <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>
18332       </div>
18333       <div class="date">
18334          7th January 2012
18335       </div>
18336       <div class="body">
18337         <p>I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
18338 the second beta version of
18339 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>.  If
18340 you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
18341 configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
18342 machines, check it out.  If you need a software solution for your
18343 school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
18344 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00000.html">available</a>
18345 on the project announcement list.</p>
18346
18347       </div>
18348       <div class="tags">
18349
18350
18351         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>.
18352
18353
18354       </div>
18355     </div>
18356     <div class="padding"></div>
18357
18358     <div class="entry">
18359       <div class="title">
18360         <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>
18361       </div>
18362       <div class="date">
18363          3rd January 2012
18364       </div>
18365       <div class="body">
18366         <p>During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
18367 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ready
18368 for release.  The initial problem I looked at was particularly
18369 interesting.</p>
18370
18371 <P>The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
18372 post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
18373 the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
18374 integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
18375 scratch.  I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
18376 remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
18377 wrap up its tasks.</p>
18378
18379 <p>Eventually the cause was found.  The kernel was simply running out
18380 of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
18381 Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
18382 to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
18383 because I was typing.</P>
18384
18385 <p>The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
18386 the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
18387 /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
18388 installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do 'find /' to
18389 generate some disk IO.  Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
18390 one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
18391 generate entropy.</p>
18392
18393 <p>The fix is in
18394 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation">beta1
18395 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze</a> version, and we
18396 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu">welcome more testers and
18397 developers</a>.  We plan to release beta2 this weekend.</p>
18398
18399       </div>
18400       <div class="tags">
18401
18402
18403         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>.
18404
18405
18406       </div>
18407     </div>
18408     <div class="padding"></div>
18409
18410     <div class="entry">
18411       <div class="title">
18412         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
18413       </div>
18414       <div class="date">
18415         21st November 2011
18416       </div>
18417       <div class="body">
18418         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
18419 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
18420 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
18421 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
18422 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
18423 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
18424 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
18425 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
18426 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
18427 the tools to do so.</p>
18428
18429 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
18430 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
18431 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
18432 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
18433
18434 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
18435 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
18436 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
18437 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
18438 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
18439 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
18440 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
18441 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
18442
18443 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
18444 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
18445 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
18446
18447 <p><pre>
18448 #!/usr/bin/perl
18449 use strict;
18450 use warnings;
18451 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
18452 BEGIN {
18453     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
18454     my %rhelmodules = (
18455         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
18456         );
18457     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
18458         eval "use $module;";
18459         if ($@) {
18460             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
18461             system("yum install -y $pkg");
18462             eval "use $module;";
18463         }
18464     }
18465 }
18466 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
18467
18468 upgrade_dell();
18469
18470 exit 0;
18471
18472 sub run_firmware_script {
18473     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
18474     unless ($script) {
18475         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
18476         exit 1
18477     }
18478     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
18479
18480     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
18481         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
18482     } else {
18483         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
18484     }
18485 }
18486
18487 sub run_firmware_scripts {
18488     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
18489     # Run firmware packages
18490     for my $dir (@dirs) {
18491         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
18492         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
18493         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
18494             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
18495             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
18496         }
18497         closedir $dh;
18498     }
18499 }
18500
18501 sub download {
18502     my $url = shift;
18503     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
18504     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
18505 }
18506
18507 sub upgrade_dell {
18508     my @dirs;
18509     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
18510     chomp $product;
18511
18512     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
18513
18514         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
18515         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
18516
18517         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
18518             CLEANUP => 1
18519             );
18520         chdir($tmpdir);
18521         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
18522         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
18523         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
18524         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
18525         my $fwopts = "-q";
18526         if (@paths) {
18527             for my $url (@paths) {
18528                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
18529             }
18530             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
18531         } else {
18532             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
18533             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
18534         }
18535         chdir('/');
18536     } else {
18537         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
18538         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
18539     }
18540 }
18541
18542 sub fetch_dell_fw {
18543     my $path = shift;
18544     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
18545     download($url);
18546 }
18547
18548 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
18549 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
18550 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
18551 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
18552     my $filename = shift;
18553
18554     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
18555     chomp $product;
18556     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
18557
18558     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
18559
18560     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
18561     my @paths;
18562     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
18563         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
18564         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
18565         my $oscode;
18566         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
18567             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
18568         } else {
18569             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
18570         }
18571         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
18572         {
18573             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
18574         }
18575     }
18576     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
18577         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
18578
18579         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
18580         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
18581
18582         my $cpath = $component->{path};
18583         for my $path (@paths) {
18584             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
18585                 push(@paths, $cpath);
18586             }
18587         }
18588     }
18589     return @paths;
18590 }
18591 </pre>
18592
18593 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
18594 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
18595 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
18596 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
18597 outdated.</p>
18598
18599       </div>
18600       <div class="tags">
18601
18602
18603         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>.
18604
18605
18606       </div>
18607     </div>
18608     <div class="padding"></div>
18609
18610     <div class="entry">
18611       <div class="title">
18612         <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>
18613       </div>
18614       <div class="date">
18615          7th October 2011
18616       </div>
18617       <div class="body">
18618         <p>Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
18619 publishing houses how to handle electronic books.  Surprisingly, the
18620 libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
18621 (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
18622 publishing houses.  Time limited renting (2-3 years) is one proposed
18623 model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
18624 Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
18625 models.</p>
18626
18627 <p>Anyway, while reading <a href="http://boklaben.no/?p=220">part of
18628 this debate</a>, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
18629 sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
18630 to a better model.  The idea is simple:</p>
18631
18632 <p>Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
18633 Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
18634 solution to hand out free e-books.  As a start, the books distributed
18635 by <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about
18636 36,000 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a>
18637 (1149 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The
18638 Internet Archive</a> (3,033,748 books) could be included, but any book
18639 where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
18640 distributed.</p>
18641
18642 <p>The computer system would make it easy to:</p>
18643
18644 <ul>
18645
18646 <li>Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
18647   other relevant equipment.</li>
18648
18649 <li>Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.</li>
18650
18651 </ul>
18652
18653 <p>In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
18654 site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
18655 visiting the library.  The site would be the distribution point for
18656 the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
18657 books available.</p>
18658
18659 <p>Are there anyone working on a system like this?  I guess it would
18660 fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
18661 libraries. :)</p>
18662
18663       </div>
18664       <div class="tags">
18665
18666
18667         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>.
18668
18669
18670       </div>
18671     </div>
18672     <div class="padding"></div>
18673
18674     <div class="entry">
18675       <div class="title">
18676         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage</a>
18677       </div>
18678       <div class="date">
18679         17th September 2011
18680       </div>
18681       <div class="body">
18682         <p>For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
18683 server.  It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
18684 movie collection easily available.  It also make it possible to let
18685 the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
18686 down.  I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
18687 subtitle options intact.  It also ensure that the entire film is one
18688 file on the disk.  As this is for personal use, the ripping is
18689 perfectly legal here in Norway.</p>
18690
18691 <p>Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:</p>
18692
18693 <blockquote><pre>
18694 #!/bin/sh
18695 # apt-get install lsdvd
18696 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
18697 dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=1M
18698 </pre></blockquote>
18699
18700 <p>But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
18701 been looking for a better alternative.  I have no idea why this I/O
18702 error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
18703 something fishy with the DVDs in question.  Or perhaps all three.</p>
18704
18705 <p>Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
18706 genisoimage.  This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
18707 movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
18708 back as an ISO.
18709
18710 <blockquote><pre>
18711 #!/bin/sh
18712 # apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
18713 set -e
18714 tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
18715 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
18716 dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
18717 genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
18718 rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
18719 </pre></blockquote>
18720
18721 <p>Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?</p>
18722
18723 <p>Update 2011-09-18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
18724 readom program from the wodim package.  It is specially written to
18725 read optical media, and is called like this: <tt>readom dev=/dev/dvd
18726 f=image.iso</tt>.  It got 6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
18727 before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.</p>
18728
18729 <p>Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
18730 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">his
18731 program python-dvdvideo</a>, which seem to be just what I am looking
18732 for.  Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
18733 creating a ISO image.  The git source built and installed just fine in
18734 Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.</p>
18735
18736       </div>
18737       <div class="tags">
18738
18739
18740         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>.
18741
18742
18743       </div>
18744     </div>
18745     <div class="padding"></div>
18746
18747     <div class="entry">
18748       <div class="title">
18749         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html">How is booting into runlevel 1 different from single user boots?</a>
18750       </div>
18751       <div class="date">
18752          4th August 2011
18753       </div>
18754       <div class="body">
18755         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
18756 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
18757 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
18758 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
18759 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
18760 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
18761 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
18762 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
18763 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
18764
18765 <p><blockquote>
18766 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
18767 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
18768 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
18769 </blockquote></p>
18770
18771 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
18772 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
18773 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
18774 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
18775 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
18776 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
18777 hard to explain.</p>
18778
18779 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
18780 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
18781 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
18782 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
18783 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
18784 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
18785 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
18786 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
18787 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
18788 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
18789 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
18790 mode).</p>
18791
18792 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
18793 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
18794 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
18795 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
18796 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
18797 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
18798 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
18799 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
18800 after visiting single user mode.</p>
18801
18802 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
18803 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
18804 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
18805 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
18806 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
18807 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
18808 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
18809 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
18810
18811 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
18812 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
18813 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
18814
18815       </div>
18816       <div class="tags">
18817
18818
18819         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>.
18820
18821
18822       </div>
18823     </div>
18824     <div class="padding"></div>
18825
18826     <div class="entry">
18827       <div class="title">
18828         <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>
18829       </div>
18830       <div class="date">
18831         30th July 2011
18832       </div>
18833       <div class="body">
18834         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
18835 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
18836 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
18837 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
18838 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
18839 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
18840 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
18841 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
18842 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
18843 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
18844 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
18845 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
18846 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
18847
18848 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
18849 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
18850 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
18851 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
18852 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
18853 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
18854 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
18855 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
18856 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
18857
18858 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
18859 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
18860 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
18861 is presented.</p>
18862
18863 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
18864 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
18865 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
18866 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
18867 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
18868 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
18869 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
18870 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
18871 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
18872 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
18873 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
18874 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
18875 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
18876 find time to push this forward.</p>
18877
18878       </div>
18879       <div class="tags">
18880
18881
18882         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>.
18883
18884
18885       </div>
18886     </div>
18887     <div class="padding"></div>
18888
18889     <div class="entry">
18890       <div class="title">
18891         <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>
18892       </div>
18893       <div class="date">
18894         29th July 2011
18895       </div>
18896       <div class="body">
18897         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
18898 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
18899 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
18900 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
18901 issues.</p>
18902
18903 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
18904 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
18905 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
18906
18907 <ol>
18908
18909 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
18910 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
18911 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
18912 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
18913 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
18914 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
18915 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
18916 Debian.</li>
18917
18918 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
18919 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
18920 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
18921 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
18922 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
18923 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
18924 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
18925 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
18926 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
18927 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
18928 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
18929 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
18930 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
18931
18932 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
18933 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
18934 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
18935 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
18936 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
18937 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
18938 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
18939 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
18940 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
18941 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
18942
18943 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
18944 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
18945 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
18946 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
18947 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
18948 latter behaviour.</li>
18949
18950 </ol>
18951
18952 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
18953 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
18954 it do not matter much.</p>
18955
18956 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
18957 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
18958 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
18959
18960       </div>
18961       <div class="tags">
18962
18963
18964         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
18965
18966
18967       </div>
18968     </div>
18969     <div class="padding"></div>
18970
18971     <div class="entry">
18972       <div class="title">
18973         <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>
18974       </div>
18975       <div class="date">
18976         26th July 2011
18977       </div>
18978       <div class="body">
18979         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
18980 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
18981 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
18982 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
18983 security support for a few years.</p>
18984
18985 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
18986 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
18987 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
18988 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
18989 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
18990 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
18991 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
18992 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
18993 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
18994 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
18995 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
18996 easier in the future.</p>
18997
18998 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
18999 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
19000 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
19001 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
19002 do not have time for.</p>
19003
19004       </div>
19005       <div class="tags">
19006
19007
19008         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>.
19009
19010
19011       </div>
19012     </div>
19013     <div class="padding"></div>
19014
19015     <div class="entry">
19016       <div class="title">
19017         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html">Free Software vs. proprietary softare...</a>
19018       </div>
19019       <div class="date">
19020         20th June 2011
19021       </div>
19022       <div class="body">
19023         <p>Reading
19024 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/06/20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/">the
19025 thingiverse blog</a>, I came across two highlights of interesting
19026 parts of the
19027 <a href="http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA">Autodesk</a>
19028 and
19029 <a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html">Microsoft
19030 Kinect</a> End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
19031 quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs.  Whenever I take
19032 the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.</p>
19033
19034       </div>
19035       <div class="tags">
19036
19037
19038         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>.
19039
19040
19041       </div>
19042     </div>
19043     <div class="padding"></div>
19044
19045     <div class="entry">
19046       <div class="title">
19047         <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>
19048       </div>
19049       <div class="date">
19050         30th April 2011
19051       </div>
19052       <div class="body">
19053         <p>Today, the first draft implementation of an
19054 <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> for the Norwegian
19055 service <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> started to
19056 work.  It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
19057 have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
19058 platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
19059 able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
19060 requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
19061 I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
19062 that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.</p>
19063
19064 <p>Where is it?  Visit
19065 <a href="http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/">http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/</a>
19066 to have a look.  Please send feedback to the
19067 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
19068 (at) nuug.no</a> mailing list.</p>
19069
19070       </div>
19071       <div class="tags">
19072
19073
19074         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>.
19075
19076
19077       </div>
19078     </div>
19079     <div class="padding"></div>
19080
19081     <div class="entry">
19082       <div class="title">
19083         <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>
19084       </div>
19085       <div class="date">
19086         29th April 2011
19087       </div>
19088       <div class="body">
19089         <p>The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
19090 the <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> in the
19091 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">Norwegian FixMyStreet service</a>.
19092 Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
19093 reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
19094 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org.nz/">New Zealand version</a> of
19095 FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
19096 me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
19097 municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
19098 Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
19099 FixMyStreet.  The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
19100 to get a draft limping along.  In the process, I have discovered a few
19101 issues with the Open311 specification.</p>
19102
19103 <p>One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
19104 handling in the specification.  The specification seem to assume all
19105 reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
19106 receiving end to specify which languages are understood there.  To be
19107 able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
19108 it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
19109 I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
19110 of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
19111 submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
19112 Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
19113 methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
19114 know which language to use when writing a problem report.  I suspect
19115 some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.</p>
19116
19117 <p>A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
19118 which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet.  One issue I
19119 run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
19120 each category.  The specification do not state that the identifier
19121 should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
19122 here.  In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
19123 category.  As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
19124 as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
19125 it.</p>
19126
19127 <p>The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
19128 differ in a key part.  FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
19129 while Open311 only have a description and lack the title.  I'm not
19130 quite sure how to best handle this yet.  When asking for a FixMyStreet
19131 report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
19132 open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
19133 should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.</p>
19134
19135 <p>The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
19136 near a geographic location.  I believe this is important if one is to
19137 use Open311 as the query language for mobile units.  The specification
19138 should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
19139 and range= options.</p>
19140
19141 <p>The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
19142 several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
19143 to assume only one administration.  For FixMyStreet, this mean a
19144 report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
19145 available depend on the location of the problem.  Not quite sure how
19146 to best handle this.  I've noticed
19147 <a href="http://seeclickfix.com/open311/">SeeClickFix</a> added
19148 latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
19149 solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
19150 Will have to investigate this a bit more.</p>
19151
19152 <p>My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
19153 up with the open311 developer group.  I really wish they had a email
19154 list available via <a href="http://www.gmane.org/">Gmane</a> to use for
19155 discussions instead of only
19156 <a href="http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss">a forum<a/>.  Oh,
19157 well.  That will probably resolve itself, one way or another.  I've
19158 also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
19159 seem to reply to my questions there.  This make me wonder if I just
19160 fail to understand how the open311 community work.  It sure do not
19161 work like the free software project communities I am used to.</p>
19162
19163       </div>
19164       <div class="tags">
19165
19166
19167         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>.
19168
19169
19170       </div>
19171     </div>
19172     <div class="padding"></div>
19173
19174     <div class="entry">
19175       <div class="title">
19176         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html">Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code 2011</a>
19177       </div>
19178       <div class="date">
19179          6th April 2011
19180       </div>
19181       <div class="body">
19182         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is still
19183 the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
19184 A few days ago the project
19185 <a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2011-04/msg00011.html">announced</a>
19186 that it will participate in Google Summer of Code.  I hope many
19187 students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
19188 into Gnash.</p>
19189
19190       </div>
19191       <div class="tags">
19192
19193
19194         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>.
19195
19196
19197       </div>
19198     </div>
19199     <div class="padding"></div>
19200
19201     <div class="entry">
19202       <div class="title">
19203         <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>
19204       </div>
19205       <div class="date">
19206          3rd April 2011
19207       </div>
19208       <div class="body">
19209         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
19210 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
19211 update in English.</p>
19212
19213 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
19214 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
19215 of the British service
19216 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
19217 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
19218 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
19219 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
19220 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
19221 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
19222 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
19223 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
19224 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
19225 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
19226 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
19227 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
19228 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
19229
19230 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
19231 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
19232 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
19233 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
19234 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
19235 public infrastructure.</p>
19236
19237 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
19238 such service?</p>
19239
19240       </div>
19241       <div class="tags">
19242
19243
19244         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>.
19245
19246
19247       </div>
19248     </div>
19249     <div class="padding"></div>
19250
19251     <div class="entry">
19252       <div class="title">
19253         <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>
19254       </div>
19255       <div class="date">
19256         28th January 2011
19257       </div>
19258       <div class="body">
19259         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
19260 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
19261 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
19262 available on the Internet, and check our locally
19263 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
19264 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
19265 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
19266 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
19267 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
19268 out which security holes were present in our free software
19269 collection.</p>
19270
19271 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
19272 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
19273 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
19274 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
19275 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
19276 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
19277 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
19278 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
19279 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
19280 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
19281 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
19282 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
19283 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
19284 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
19285 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
19286 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
19287
19288 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
19289 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
19290 check out, one could look up
19291 <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
19292 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
19293 The most recent one is
19294 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
19295 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
19296 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
19297
19298 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
19299 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
19300 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
19301 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
19302 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
19303 security issues out.</p>
19304
19305 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
19306 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
19307 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
19308 RHEL is providing
19309 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
19310 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
19311 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
19312
19313 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
19314 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
19315 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
19316 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
19317 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
19318 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
19319 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
19320 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
19321 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
19322 established soon.</p>
19323
19324 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
19325 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
19326 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
19327 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
19328 for their packages.</p>
19329
19330       </div>
19331       <div class="tags">
19332
19333
19334         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>.
19335
19336
19337       </div>
19338     </div>
19339     <div class="padding"></div>
19340
19341     <div class="entry">
19342       <div class="title">
19343         <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>
19344       </div>
19345       <div class="date">
19346         23rd January 2011
19347       </div>
19348       <div class="body">
19349         <p>In the
19350 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
19351 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
19352 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
19353 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
19354 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
19355 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
19356 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
19357 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
19358 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
19359 one of my machines like this:</p>
19360
19361 <pre>
19362 loaded modules:
19363 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
19364 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
19365 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
19366 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
19367 10de:03ec pata_amd
19368 10de:03f6 sata_nv
19369 1022:1103 k8temp
19370 109e:036e bttv
19371 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
19372 11ab:4364 sky2
19373 </pre>
19374
19375 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
19376 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
19377
19378 <pre>
19379 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
19380     echo loaded pci modules:
19381     (
19382         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
19383         for address in * ; do
19384             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
19385                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
19386                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
19387                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
19388                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
19389                     echo "$id $module"
19390                 fi
19391             fi
19392         done
19393     )
19394     echo
19395 fi
19396 </pre>
19397
19398 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
19399 mappings:</p>
19400
19401 <pre>
19402 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
19403     echo loaded usb modules:
19404     (
19405         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
19406         for address in * ; do
19407             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
19408                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
19409                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
19410                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
19411                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
19412                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
19413                         echo "$id $module"
19414                     fi
19415                 fi
19416             fi
19417         done
19418     )
19419     echo
19420 fi
19421 </pre>
19422
19423 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
19424 well.</p>
19425
19426       </div>
19427       <div class="tags">
19428
19429
19430         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>.
19431
19432
19433       </div>
19434     </div>
19435     <div class="padding"></div>
19436
19437     <div class="entry">
19438       <div class="title">
19439         <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>
19440       </div>
19441       <div class="date">
19442         16th January 2011
19443       </div>
19444       <div class="body">
19445         <p>The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
19446 contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H.264 and WebM.  Most video sites
19447 seem to use H.264, while others use Ogg Theora.  Interestingly enough,
19448 the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
19449 H.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
19450 the Wikipedia article on
19451 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">HTML5 video</a>,
19452 this is not true.  Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
19453 different browsers there.  The format supported by most browsers is
19454 Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
19455 Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
19456 BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
19457 The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
19458 Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
19459 Firefox.  H.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
19460 Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
19461 Explorer.  Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
19462 Safari can install plugins to get it.</p>
19463
19464 <p>To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
19465 without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
19466 HTML5 video tag.   Of course to reach all those without a browser
19467 handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms.  In
19468 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a>, we provide first fallback to a
19469 plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
19470 we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
19471 Theora.  This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an <a
19472 href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20110111-semantic-web/">example
19473 from last week</a>.</p>
19474
19475 <p>The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H.264 is
19476 the least supported is simple.  Implementing and using H.264
19477 require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
19478 are incompatible with free software licensing.  If you believed H.264
19479 was without royalties and license terms, check out
19480 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
19481 Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps.</p>
19482
19483 <p>A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
19484 available from
19485 <a href="http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos">the
19486 Xiph.org wiki</a>, if you want to have a look.  I'm not aware of a
19487 similar list for WebM nor H.264.</p>
19488
19489 <p>Update 2011-01-16 09:40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
19490 realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
19491 &lt;video&gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
19492 provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.</p>
19493
19494       </div>
19495       <div class="tags">
19496
19497
19498         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
19499
19500
19501       </div>
19502     </div>
19503     <div class="padding"></div>
19504
19505     <div class="entry">
19506       <div class="title">
19507         <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>
19508       </div>
19509       <div class="date">
19510         12th January 2011
19511       </div>
19512       <div class="body">
19513         <p>Today I discovered
19514 <a href="http://www.digi.no/860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome">via
19515 digi.no</a> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
19516 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html">yesterday
19517 announced</a> plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt; in
19518 the browser.  The argument used is that H.264 is not a "completely
19519 open" codec technology.  If you believe H.264 was free for everyone
19520 to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
19521 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
19522 Free That Matters</a>".  It is not free of cost for creators of video
19523 tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
19524 terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
19525 licensing the patents needed for H.264.  Some background information
19526 on the Google announcement is available from
19527 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome">OSnews</a>.
19528 A good read. :)</p>
19529
19530 <p>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
19531 promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
19532 the Internet.  This can only be done by publishing using free and open
19533 standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
19534 for these free and open standards.  At the moment there seem to be two
19535 camps in the web browser world when it come to video support.  Some
19536 browsers support H.264, and others support
19537 <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg Theora</a> and
19538 <a href="http://www.webmproject.org/">WebM</a>
19539 (<a href="http://www.diracvideo.org/">Dirac</a> is not really an option
19540 yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
19541 and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
19542 H.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
19543 Wikipedia keep <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">an
19544 updated summary</a> of the current browser support.</p>
19545
19546 <p>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
19547 promoting H.264, and John Gruber
19548 <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/simple_questions">presents
19549 the mind set</a> of these people quite well.  His rhetorical questions
19550 provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
19551 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24245/10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM">presenting
19552 the issues with H.264</a>. Both are worth a read.</p>
19553
19554 <p>Some argue that if Google is dropping H.264 because it isn't free,
19555 they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin.  This
19556 argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
19557 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm">todays
19558 blog post</a>, which I find to put the issue in context.  To me it
19559 make perfect sense to drop native H.264 support for HTML5 in the
19560 browser while still allowing plugins.</p>
19561
19562 <p>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
19563 is that all the users and promoters of H.264 suddenly get an uneasy
19564 feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse.  A lot of TV
19565 broadcasters have been moving to H.264 the last few years, and a lot
19566 of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
19567 could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
19568 publishing.  Suddenly this belief is shaken.</p>
19569
19570 <p>An interesting question is why Google is doing this.  While the
19571 presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
19572 present the argument if the change make sense from a business
19573 perspective.  One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
19574 with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
19575 feeling that dropping H.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
19576 Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
19577 Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
19578 to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
19579 video format not requiring royalties at all.  A third reason might be
19580 that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
19581 Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
19582 I guess time will tell.</p>
19583
19584 <p>Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided
19585 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html">more
19586 background and information on the move</a> it a blog post yesterday.</p>
19587
19588       </div>
19589       <div class="tags">
19590
19591
19592         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
19593
19594
19595       </div>
19596     </div>
19597     <div class="padding"></div>
19598
19599     <div class="entry">
19600       <div class="title">
19601         <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>
19602       </div>
19603       <div class="date">
19604         30th December 2010
19605       </div>
19606       <div class="body">
19607         <p>After trying to
19608 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">compare
19609 Ogg Theora</a> to
19610 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the Digistan
19611 definition</a> of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
19612 to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
19613 this.  As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
19614 the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
19615 JPEG, PNG, SVG and others.  But to be able to complete this in a
19616 reasonable time frame, I will need help.</p>
19617
19618 <p>If you want to help out with this work, please visit
19619 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse">the
19620 wiki pages I have set up for this</a>, and let me know that you want
19621 to help out.  The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
19622 place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
19623 NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
19624 of the Norwegian Unix User Group).</p>
19625
19626 <p>The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do.  Do not be
19627 scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)</p>
19628
19629       </div>
19630       <div class="tags">
19631
19632
19633         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>.
19634
19635
19636       </div>
19637     </div>
19638     <div class="padding"></div>
19639
19640     <div class="entry">
19641       <div class="title">
19642         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html">The many definitions of a open standard</a>
19643       </div>
19644       <div class="date">
19645         27th December 2010
19646       </div>
19647       <div class="body">
19648         <p>One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
19649 "<a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">Free and
19650 Open Standard</a>" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
19651 the term has been decided by Digistan.  The term "Open Standard" has
19652 become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
19653 about standards.  One end up discussing which definition is the best
19654 one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
19655 de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.</p>
19656
19657 <p>But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
19658 standards, here are a few that I know about.  This list is not
19659 complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
19660 complete survey.  More definitions are available on the
19661 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard">wikipedia
19662 page</a>.</p>
19663
19664 <p>First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
19665 Interoperability Framework version 1.0.  Really sad to notice that BSA
19666 and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version 2.0 of the
19667 framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
19668 their own people.  Anyway, the definition is still available and it
19669 include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
19670 specification on equal terms.</p>
19671
19672 <blockquote>
19673
19674 <p>The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
19675 and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
19676 open standard:</p>
19677
19678 <ul>
19679
19680 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
19681 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
19682 open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
19683 (consensus or majority decision etc.).</li>
19684
19685 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
19686 document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
19687 permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
19688 nominal fee.</li>
19689
19690 <li>The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
19691 (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
19692 free basis.</li>
19693
19694 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
19695
19696 </ul>
19697 </blockquote>
19698
19699 <p>Another one originates from my friends over at
19700 <a href="http://www.dkuug.dk/">DKUUG</a>, who coined and gathered
19701 support for <a href="http://www.aaben-standard.dk/">this
19702 definition</a> in 2004.  It even made it into the Danish parlament as
19703 <a href="http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm">their
19704 definition of a open standard</a>.  Another from a different part of
19705 the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.</p>
19706
19707 <blockquote>
19708
19709 <p>En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:</p>
19710
19711 <ol>
19712
19713 <li>Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
19714 tilgængelig.</li>
19715
19716 <li>Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
19717 begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.</li>
19718
19719 <li>Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
19720 "standardiseringsorganisation") via en åben proces.</li>
19721
19722 </ol>
19723
19724 </blockquote>
19725
19726 <p>Then there is <a href="http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html">the
19727 definition</a> from Free Software Foundation Europe.</p>
19728
19729 <blockquote>
19730
19731 <p>An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is</p>
19732
19733 <ol>
19734
19735 <li>subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
19736 manner equally available to all parties;</li>
19737
19738 <li>without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
19739 formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
19740 Standard themselves;</li>
19741
19742 <li>free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
19743 any party or in any business model;</li>
19744
19745 <li>managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
19746 in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
19747 parties;</li>
19748
19749 <li>available in multiple complete implementations by competing
19750 vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
19751 parties.</li>
19752
19753 </ol>
19754
19755 </blockquote>
19756
19757 <p>A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
19758 its
19759 <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%20Standard%20Definition.pdf">Open
19760 Standards Checklist</a> with a fairly detailed description.</p>
19761
19762 <blockquote>
19763 <p>Creation and Management of an Open Standard
19764
19765 <ul>
19766
19767 <li>Its development and management process must be collaborative and
19768   democratic:
19769
19770          <ul>
19771
19772          <li>Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
19773             participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
19774             imposed by the organization under which it is developed
19775             and managed.</li>
19776
19777          <li>The processes must be documented and, through a known
19778             method, can be changed through input from all
19779             participants.</li>
19780
19781          <li>The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
19782             the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.</li>
19783
19784          <li>Development and management should strive for consensus,
19785             and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.</li>
19786
19787          <li>The standard specification must be open to extensive
19788             public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
19789             comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.</li>
19790
19791          </ul>
19792
19793 </li>
19794
19795 </ul>
19796
19797 <p>Use and Licensing of an Open Standard</p>
19798 <ul>
19799
19800 <li>The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
19801   and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
19802   implementations to the interface described in the standard without
19803   undue or restrictive constraints.  Interfaces include APIs,
19804   protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.</li>
19805
19806 <li> The standard must not contain any proprietary "hooks" that create
19807   a technical or economic barriers</li>
19808
19809 <li>Faithful implementations of the standard must
19810   interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
19811   program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
19812   programs and mutually to use the information which has been
19813   exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
19814   file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
19815   conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
19816   computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
19817   intended to function.</li>
19818
19819 <li>It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
19820   standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
19821   must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.</li>
19822
19823 <li>It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
19824   fees; also known as "royalty free"), worldwide, non-exclusive and
19825   perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
19826   sell products based on the standard.  The only exceptions are
19827   terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
19828   outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
19829   patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
19830   only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
19831
19832       <ul>
19833
19834       <li> May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
19835         licensees' patent claims essential to practice that standard
19836         (also known as a reciprocity clause)</li>
19837
19838       <li> May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
19839         or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
19840         essential to practice that standard (also known as a
19841         "defensive suspension" clause)</li>
19842
19843       <li> The same licensing terms are available to every potential
19844         licensor</li>
19845
19846       </ul>
19847 </li>
19848
19849 <li>The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
19850   implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
19851   or restricted licensing terms</li>
19852
19853 </ul>
19854
19855 </blockquote>
19856
19857 <p>It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
19858 there are so many of them.  As you can see, the same holds true for
19859 open standard definitions.  Most of the definitions have a lot in
19860 common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
19861 standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
19862 possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
19863 competition to downplay the significance of open standards.  I hope we
19864 can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
19865 Standards.</p>
19866
19867       </div>
19868       <div class="tags">
19869
19870
19871         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>.
19872
19873
19874       </div>
19875     </div>
19876     <div class="padding"></div>
19877
19878     <div class="entry">
19879       <div class="title">
19880         <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>
19881       </div>
19882       <div class="date">
19883         25th December 2010
19884       </div>
19885       <div class="body">
19886         <p><a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">The
19887 Digistan definition</a> of a free and open standard reads like this:</p>
19888
19889 <blockquote>
19890
19891 <p>The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
19892 as follows:</p>
19893
19894 <ol>
19895
19896 <li>A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
19897 in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
19898 freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.</li>
19899
19900 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
19901 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
19902 open decision-making procedure available to all interested
19903 parties.</li>
19904
19905 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
19906 document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
19907 distribute, and use it freely.</li>
19908
19909 <li>The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
19910 irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.</li>
19911
19912 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
19913
19914 </ol>
19915
19916 <p>The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
19917 measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
19918 products based on the standard.</p>
19919 </blockquote>
19920
19921 <p>For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
19922 and open standard according to this definition.  Here is a short
19923 writeup of what I have been able to gather so far.  I brought up the
19924 topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
19925 <a href="http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/2009-July/001632.html">in
19926 July 2009</a>, for those that want to see some background information.
19927 According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
19928 the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.</p>
19929
19930 <p><strong>Free from vendor capture?</strong></p>
19931
19932 <p>As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
19933 Ogg Theora specification.  It can be argued that the
19934 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/">Xiph foundation</A> is such vendor, but
19935 given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
19936 making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
19937 obvious that this is a real risk.  One issue with the Xiph
19938 foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
19939 control the foundation) are not easily available on the web.  I've
19940 been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
19941 seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
19942 where is is spent in the foundation.  It is thus not obvious for an
19943 external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
19944 it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
19945 specification.  But it seem unlikely.</p>
19946
19947 <p><strong>Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?</strong></p>
19948
19949 <p>Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
19950 claim it to be, this point is fulfilled.  If Xiph foundation is
19951 controlled by a single vendor, it isn't, but I have not found any
19952 documentation indicating this.</p>
19953
19954 <p>According to
19955 <a href="http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf">a report</a>
19956 prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
19957 government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
19958 the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
19959 Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
19960 report is correct.</p>
19961
19962 <p><strong>Specification freely available?</strong></p>
19963
19964 <p>The specification for the <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/">Ogg
19965 container format</a> and both the
19966 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/">Vorbis</a> and
19967 <a href="http://theora.org/doc/">Theora</a> codeces are available on
19968 the web.  This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:
19969
19970 <blockquote>
19971
19972 Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
19973 specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
19974 capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
19975 the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
19976 specification compliance.
19977
19978 </blockquote>
19979
19980 <p>The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
19981 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt">RFC 3533</a>, and
19982 this is the term:<p>
19983
19984 <blockquote>
19985
19986 <p>This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
19987 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
19988 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
19989 distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
19990 provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
19991 included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
19992 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
19993 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
19994 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
19995 Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
19996 in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
19997 translate it into languages other than English.</p>
19998
19999 <p>The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
20000 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.</p>
20001 </blockquote>
20002
20003 <p>All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
20004 this term seem to be fulfilled.  There might be a problem with the
20005 missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
20006 thus reuse it in other specifications.  Not quite sure if that is a
20007 requirement for the Digistan definition.</p>
20008
20009 <p><strong>Royalty-free?</strong></p>
20010
20011 <p>There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
20012 Theora format.
20013 <a href="http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=65782">MPEG-LA</a>
20014 and
20015 <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit">Steve
20016 Jobs</a> in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
20017 patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
20018 them.  Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
20019 this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
20020 without paying any royalties.  For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
20021 Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H.264 codec
20022 than any real problem with Ogg Theora.</p>
20023
20024 <p><strong>No constraints on re-use?</strong></p>
20025
20026 <p>I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.</p>
20027
20028 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
20029
20030 <p>3 of 5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining 2
20031 depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation.  Given the
20032 background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
20033 safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
20034 would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
20035 this.</p>
20036
20037 <p>It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
20038 see if they are free and open standards.</p>
20039
20040       </div>
20041       <div class="tags">
20042
20043
20044         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
20045
20046
20047       </div>
20048     </div>
20049     <div class="padding"></div>
20050
20051     <div class="entry">
20052       <div class="title">
20053         <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>
20054       </div>
20055       <div class="date">
20056         25th December 2010
20057       </div>
20058       <div class="body">
20059         <p>A few days ago
20060 <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece">an
20061 article</a> in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
20062 2.0 of
20063 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework">European
20064 Interoperability Framework</a> has been successfully lobbied by the
20065 proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
20066 Nothing very surprising there, given
20067 <a href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/29/2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe">earlier
20068 reports</a> on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
20069 this work.  But I find this very sad.   The definition of
20070 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-200506.txt">an
20071 open standard from version 1</a> was very good, and something I
20072 believe should be used also in the future, alongside
20073 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the
20074 definition from Digistan</A>.  Version 2 have removed the open
20075 standard definition from its content.</p>
20076
20077 <p>Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
20078 Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
20079 to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
20080 in the public sector in Peru.  As the text was not available from a
20081 few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
20082 <a href="http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html">my
20083 source</a> to ensure it is available also in the future.  Some
20084 background information about that story is available in
20085 <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6099">an article</a> from
20086 Linux Journal in 2002.</p>
20087
20088 <blockquote>
20089 <p>Lima, 8th of April, 2002<br>
20090 To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ<br>
20091 General Manager of Microsoft Perú</p>
20092
20093 <p>Dear Sir:</p>
20094
20095 <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>
20096
20097 <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>
20098
20099 <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>
20100
20101 <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>
20102
20103 <p>
20104 <ul>
20105 <li>Free access to public information by the citizen. </li>
20106 <li>Permanence of public data. </li>
20107 <li>Security of the State and citizens.</li>
20108 </ul>
20109 </p>
20110
20111 <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>
20112
20113 <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>
20114
20115 <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>
20116
20117 <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>
20118
20119 <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>
20120
20121
20122 <p>From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:<br>
20123 <li>the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software</li>
20124 <li>the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software</li>
20125 <li>the law does not specify which concrete software to use</li>
20126 <li>the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought</li>
20127 <li>the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.</li>
20128
20129 </p>
20130
20131 <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>
20132
20133 <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>
20134
20135 <p>As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:</p>
20136
20137 <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>
20138
20139 <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>
20140
20141 <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>
20142
20143 <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>
20144
20145 <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>
20146
20147 <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>
20148
20149 <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>
20150
20151 <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>
20152
20153 <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>
20154
20155 <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>
20156
20157 <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>
20158
20159 <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>
20160
20161 <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>
20162
20163 <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>
20164
20165 <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>
20166
20167 <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>
20168
20169 <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>
20170
20171 <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>
20172
20173 <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>
20174
20175 <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>
20176
20177 <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>
20178
20179 <p>On security:</p>
20180
20181 <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>
20182
20183 <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>
20184
20185 <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>
20186
20187 <p>In respect of the guarantee:</p>
20188
20189 <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>
20190
20191 <p>On Intellectual Property:</p>
20192
20193 <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>
20194
20195 <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>
20196
20197 <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>
20198
20199 <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>
20200
20201 <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>
20202
20203 <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>
20204
20205 <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>
20206
20207 <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>
20208
20209 <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>
20210
20211 <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>
20212
20213 <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>
20214
20215 <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>
20216
20217 <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>
20218
20219 <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>
20220
20221 <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>
20222
20223 <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>
20224
20225 <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>
20226
20227 <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>
20228
20229 <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>
20230
20231 <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>
20232
20233 <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>
20234
20235 <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>
20236
20237 <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>
20238
20239 <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>
20240
20241 <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>
20242
20243 <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>
20244
20245 <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>
20246
20247 <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>
20248
20249 <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>
20250
20251 <p>Cordially,<br>
20252 DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ<br>
20253 Congressman of the Republic of Perú.</p>
20254 </blockquote>
20255
20256       </div>
20257       <div class="tags">
20258
20259
20260         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>.
20261
20262
20263       </div>
20264     </div>
20265     <div class="padding"></div>
20266
20267     <div class="entry">
20268       <div class="title">
20269         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html">Officeshots still going strong</a>
20270       </div>
20271       <div class="date">
20272         25th December 2010
20273       </div>
20274       <div class="body">
20275         <p>Half a year ago I
20276 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">wrote
20277 a bit</a> about <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>,
20278 a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
20279 the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.</p>
20280
20281 <p>I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
20282 Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
20283 different Office implementations handle different ODF features.  Sad
20284 to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
20285 LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
20286 for OfficeShots users yet).  I am glad to see that the ODF community
20287 got such a great test tool available.</p>
20288
20289       </div>
20290       <div class="tags">
20291
20292
20293         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>.
20294
20295
20296       </div>
20297     </div>
20298     <div class="padding"></div>
20299
20300     <div class="entry">
20301       <div class="title">
20302         <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>
20303       </div>
20304       <div class="date">
20305         22nd December 2010
20306       </div>
20307       <div class="body">
20308         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
20309 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
20310 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
20311 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
20312 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
20313 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
20314 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
20315 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
20316 university.</p>
20317
20318 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
20319 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
20320 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
20321 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
20322 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
20323 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
20324 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
20325 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
20326
20327 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
20328 I perform on a new model.</p>
20329
20330 <ul>
20331
20332 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
20333 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
20334 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
20335
20336 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
20337 installation, X.org is working.</li>
20338
20339 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
20340 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
20341 reported by the program.</li>
20342
20343 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
20344 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
20345 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
20346 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
20347 normally test this by playing
20348 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
20349 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
20350
20351 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
20352 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
20353
20354 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
20355 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
20356
20357 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
20358 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
20359
20360 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
20361 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
20362 few.</li>
20363
20364 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
20365 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
20366 notice this.</li>
20367
20368 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
20369 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
20370 resume.</li>
20371
20372 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
20373 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
20374 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
20375 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
20376 not.</li>
20377
20378 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
20379 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
20380 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
20381 existence.</li>
20382
20383 </ul>
20384
20385 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
20386 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
20387 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
20388 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
20389 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
20390 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
20391 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
20392 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
20393
20394       </div>
20395       <div class="tags">
20396
20397
20398         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>.
20399
20400
20401       </div>
20402     </div>
20403     <div class="padding"></div>
20404
20405     <div class="entry">
20406       <div class="title">
20407         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
20408       </div>
20409       <div class="date">
20410         11th December 2010
20411       </div>
20412       <div class="body">
20413         <p>As I continue to explore
20414 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
20415 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
20416 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
20417
20418 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
20419 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
20420 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
20421 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
20422 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
20423 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
20424 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
20425 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
20426 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
20427 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
20428 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
20429 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
20430 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
20431 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
20432 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
20433 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
20434 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
20435 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
20436 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
20437 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
20438
20439 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
20440 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
20441 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
20442 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
20443 If the Skolelinux foundation
20444 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
20445 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
20446 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
20447 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
20448 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
20449 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
20450 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
20451 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
20452
20453 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
20454 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
20455 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
20456 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
20457 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
20458 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
20459 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
20460 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
20461 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
20462 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
20463 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
20464 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
20465 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
20466 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
20467 currencies.</p>
20468
20469 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
20470 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
20471 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
20472 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
20473 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
20474 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
20475 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
20476 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
20477 BitCoins.  Check out
20478 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
20479 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
20480 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
20481 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
20482 yet.</p>
20483
20484 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
20485 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
20486 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
20487 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
20488 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
20489
20490       </div>
20491       <div class="tags">
20492
20493
20494         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>.
20495
20496
20497       </div>
20498     </div>
20499     <div class="padding"></div>
20500
20501     <div class="entry">
20502       <div class="title">
20503         <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>
20504       </div>
20505       <div class="date">
20506         10th December 2010
20507       </div>
20508       <div class="body">
20509         <p>With this weeks lawless
20510 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
20511 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
20512 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
20513 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
20514 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
20515 A blog post from
20516 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
20517 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
20518 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
20519 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
20520 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
20521 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
20522 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
20523
20524 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
20525 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
20526 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
20527 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
20528 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
20529 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
20530 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
20531 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
20532 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
20533 Debian</a> soon.</p>
20534
20535 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
20536 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
20537 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
20538 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
20539 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
20540 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
20541 you can even get
20542 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
20543 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
20544 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
20545 on the current exchange rates.</p>
20546
20547 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
20548 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
20549 donations to the address
20550 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
20551
20552       </div>
20553       <div class="tags">
20554
20555
20556         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>.
20557
20558
20559       </div>
20560     </div>
20561     <div class="padding"></div>
20562
20563     <div class="entry">
20564       <div class="title">
20565         <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>
20566       </div>
20567       <div class="date">
20568          9th December 2010
20569       </div>
20570       <div class="body">
20571         <p>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
20572 student assosiation <a href="http://www.robotica.no/">Robotica
20573 Osloensis</a> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
20574 get their own 3D printer.  They wanted to learn from me based on my
20575 work in the area.  After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
20576 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
20577 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon.  I look
20578 forward to see how this goes.  This monday their volunteer driver
20579 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
20580 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the 3D printer
20581 operational.</p>
20582
20583 <p>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
20584 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational.  I really look
20585 forward to being able to print all the cool 3D designs published on
20586 <a href="http://www.thingiverse.com/">Thingiverse</a>.  I even got
20587 some 3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
20588 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
20589 very cool 3D scanner.</p>
20590
20591       </div>
20592       <div class="tags">
20593
20594
20595         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>.
20596
20597
20598       </div>
20599     </div>
20600     <div class="padding"></div>
20601
20602     <div class="entry">
20603       <div class="title">
20604         <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>
20605       </div>
20606       <div class="date">
20607         29th November 2010
20608       </div>
20609       <div class="body">
20610         <p>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
20611 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2010-12-03-05-Oslo">development
20612 gathering</a> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway.  I
20613 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
20614 Squeeze release.  The gathering is open for everyone interested in
20615 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
20616
20617 <p>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
20618 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
20619 will hold its
20620 <a href="http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/2010">General Assembly
20621 for 2010</a>.  Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388
20622 people registered as members.  Last year 32 members cast their vote in
20623 the memberdb based election system.  I hope more people find time to
20624 vote this year.</p>
20625
20626       </div>
20627       <div class="tags">
20628
20629
20630         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>.
20631
20632
20633       </div>
20634     </div>
20635     <div class="padding"></div>
20636
20637     <div class="entry">
20638       <div class="title">
20639         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
20640       </div>
20641       <div class="date">
20642         27th November 2010
20643       </div>
20644       <div class="body">
20645         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
20646 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
20647 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
20648 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
20649 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
20650 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
20651 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
20652 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
20653
20654 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
20655 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
20656 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
20657 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
20658 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
20659 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
20660 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
20661 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
20662 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
20663 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
20664 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
20665
20666 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
20667 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
20668 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
20669 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
20670 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
20671 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
20672 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
20673 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
20674 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
20675 what is going on.</p>
20676
20677       </div>
20678       <div class="tags">
20679
20680
20681         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>.
20682
20683
20684       </div>
20685     </div>
20686     <div class="padding"></div>
20687
20688     <div class="entry">
20689       <div class="title">
20690         <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>
20691       </div>
20692       <div class="date">
20693         22nd November 2010
20694       </div>
20695       <div class="body">
20696         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
20697 upgrade testing of the
20698 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
20699 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
20700 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
20701 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
20702
20703 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
20704
20705 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
20706
20707 <blockquote><p>
20708   apache2.2-bin
20709   aptdaemon
20710   baobab
20711   binfmt-support
20712   browser-plugin-gnash
20713   cheese-common
20714   cli-common
20715   cups-pk-helper
20716   dmz-cursor-theme
20717   empathy
20718   empathy-common
20719   freedesktop-sound-theme
20720   freeglut3
20721   gconf-defaults-service
20722   gdm-themes
20723   gedit-plugins
20724   geoclue
20725   geoclue-hostip
20726   geoclue-localnet
20727   geoclue-manual
20728   geoclue-yahoo
20729   gnash
20730   gnash-common
20731   gnome
20732   gnome-backgrounds
20733   gnome-cards-data
20734   gnome-codec-install
20735   gnome-core
20736   gnome-desktop-environment
20737   gnome-disk-utility
20738   gnome-screenshot
20739   gnome-search-tool
20740   gnome-session-canberra
20741   gnome-system-log
20742   gnome-themes-extras
20743   gnome-themes-more
20744   gnome-user-share
20745   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
20746   gstreamer0.10-tools
20747   gtk2-engines
20748   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
20749   gtk2-engines-smooth
20750   hamster-applet
20751   libapache2-mod-dnssd
20752   libapr1
20753   libaprutil1
20754   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
20755   libaprutil1-ldap
20756   libart2.0-cil
20757   libboost-date-time1.42.0
20758   libboost-python1.42.0
20759   libboost-thread1.42.0
20760   libchamplain-0.4-0
20761   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
20762   libcheese-gtk18
20763   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
20764   libcryptui0
20765   libdiscid0
20766   libelf1
20767   libepc-1.0-2
20768   libepc-common
20769   libepc-ui-1.0-2
20770   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
20771   libfreerdp0
20772   libgconf2.0-cil
20773   libgdata-common
20774   libgdata7
20775   libgdu-gtk0
20776   libgee2
20777   libgeoclue0
20778   libgexiv2-0
20779   libgif4
20780   libglade2.0-cil
20781   libglib2.0-cil
20782   libgmime2.4-cil
20783   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
20784   libgnome2.24-cil
20785   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
20786   libgpod-common
20787   libgpod4
20788   libgtk2.0-cil
20789   libgtkglext1
20790   libgtksourceview2.0-common
20791   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
20792   libmono-addins0.2-cil
20793   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
20794   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
20795   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
20796   libmono-posix2.0-cil
20797   libmono-security2.0-cil
20798   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
20799   libmono-system2.0-cil
20800   libmtp8
20801   libmusicbrainz3-6
20802   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
20803   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
20804   libopal3.6.8
20805   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
20806   libpt2.6.7
20807   libpython2.6
20808   librpm1
20809   librpmio1
20810   libsdl1.2debian
20811   libsrtp0
20812   libssh-4
20813   libtelepathy-farsight0
20814   libtelepathy-glib0
20815   libtidy-0.99-0
20816   media-player-info
20817   mesa-utils
20818   mono-2.0-gac
20819   mono-gac
20820   mono-runtime
20821   nautilus-sendto
20822   nautilus-sendto-empathy
20823   p7zip-full
20824   pkg-config
20825   python-aptdaemon
20826   python-aptdaemon-gtk
20827   python-axiom
20828   python-beautifulsoup
20829   python-bugbuddy
20830   python-clientform
20831   python-coherence
20832   python-configobj
20833   python-crypto
20834   python-cupshelpers
20835   python-elementtree
20836   python-epsilon
20837   python-evolution
20838   python-feedparser
20839   python-gdata
20840   python-gdbm
20841   python-gst0.10
20842   python-gtkglext1
20843   python-gtksourceview2
20844   python-httplib2
20845   python-louie
20846   python-mako
20847   python-markupsafe
20848   python-mechanize
20849   python-nevow
20850   python-notify
20851   python-opengl
20852   python-openssl
20853   python-pam
20854   python-pkg-resources
20855   python-pyasn1
20856   python-pysqlite2
20857   python-rdflib
20858   python-serial
20859   python-tagpy
20860   python-twisted-bin
20861   python-twisted-conch
20862   python-twisted-core
20863   python-twisted-web
20864   python-utidylib
20865   python-webkit
20866   python-xdg
20867   python-zope.interface
20868   remmina
20869   remmina-plugin-data
20870   remmina-plugin-rdp
20871   remmina-plugin-vnc
20872   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
20873   rhythmbox-plugins
20874   rpm-common
20875   rpm2cpio
20876   seahorse-plugins
20877   shotwell
20878   software-center
20879   system-config-printer-udev
20880   telepathy-gabble
20881   telepathy-mission-control-5
20882   telepathy-salut
20883   tomboy
20884   totem
20885   totem-coherence
20886   totem-mozilla
20887   totem-plugins
20888   transmission-common
20889   xdg-user-dirs
20890   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
20891   xserver-xephyr
20892 </p></blockquote>
20893
20894 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
20895
20896 <blockquote><p>
20897   cheese
20898   ekiga
20899   eog
20900   epiphany-extensions
20901   evolution-exchange
20902   fast-user-switch-applet
20903   file-roller
20904   gcalctool
20905   gconf-editor
20906   gdm
20907   gedit
20908   gedit-common
20909   gnome-games
20910   gnome-games-data
20911   gnome-nettool
20912   gnome-system-tools
20913   gnome-themes
20914   gnuchess
20915   gucharmap
20916   guile-1.8-libs
20917   libavahi-ui0
20918   libdmx1
20919   libgalago3
20920   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
20921   libgtksourceview2.0-0
20922   liblircclient0
20923   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
20924   libspeexdsp1
20925   libsvga1
20926   rhythmbox
20927   seahorse
20928   sound-juicer
20929   system-config-printer
20930   totem-common
20931   transmission-gtk
20932   vinagre
20933   vino
20934 </p></blockquote>
20935
20936 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
20937
20938 <blockquote><p>
20939   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
20940 </p></blockquote>
20941
20942 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
20943
20944 <blockquote><p>
20945 [nothing]
20946 </p></blockquote>
20947
20948 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
20949
20950 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
20951
20952 <blockquote><p>
20953   ksmserver
20954 </p></blockquote>
20955
20956 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
20957
20958 <blockquote><p>
20959   kwin
20960   network-manager-kde
20961 </p></blockquote>
20962
20963 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
20964
20965 <blockquote><p>
20966   arts
20967   dolphin
20968   freespacenotifier
20969   google-gadgets-gst
20970   google-gadgets-xul
20971   kappfinder
20972   kcalc
20973   kcharselect
20974   kde-core
20975   kde-plasma-desktop
20976   kde-standard
20977   kde-window-manager
20978   kdeartwork
20979   kdeartwork-emoticons
20980   kdeartwork-style
20981   kdeartwork-theme-icon
20982   kdebase
20983   kdebase-apps
20984   kdebase-workspace
20985   kdebase-workspace-bin
20986   kdebase-workspace-data
20987   kdeeject
20988   kdelibs
20989   kdeplasma-addons
20990   kdeutils
20991   kdewallpapers
20992   kdf
20993   kfloppy
20994   kgpg
20995   khelpcenter4
20996   kinfocenter
20997   konq-plugins-l10n
20998   konqueror-nsplugins
20999   kscreensaver
21000   kscreensaver-xsavers
21001   ktimer
21002   kwrite
21003   libgle3
21004   libkde4-ruby1.8
21005   libkonq5
21006   libkonq5-templates
21007   libnetpbm10
21008   libplasma-ruby
21009   libplasma-ruby1.8
21010   libqt4-ruby1.8
21011   marble-data
21012   marble-plugins
21013   netpbm
21014   nuvola-icon-theme
21015   plasma-dataengines-workspace
21016   plasma-desktop
21017   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
21018   plasma-runners-addons
21019   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
21020   plasma-scriptengine-python
21021   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
21022   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
21023   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
21024   plasma-scriptengines
21025   plasma-wallpapers-addons
21026   plasma-widget-folderview
21027   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
21028   ruby
21029   sweeper
21030   update-notifier-kde
21031   xscreensaver-data-extra
21032   xscreensaver-gl
21033   xscreensaver-gl-extra
21034   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
21035 </p></blockquote>
21036
21037 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
21038
21039 <blockquote><p>
21040   ark
21041   google-gadgets-common
21042   google-gadgets-qt
21043   htdig
21044   kate
21045   kdebase-bin
21046   kdebase-data
21047   kdepasswd
21048   kfind
21049   klipper
21050   konq-plugins
21051   konqueror
21052   ksysguard
21053   ksysguardd
21054   libarchive1
21055   libcln6
21056   libeet1
21057   libeina-svn-06
21058   libggadget-1.0-0b
21059   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
21060   libgps19
21061   libkdecorations4
21062   libkephal4
21063   libkonq4
21064   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
21065   libkscreensaver5
21066   libksgrd4
21067   libksignalplotter4
21068   libkunitconversion4
21069   libkwineffects1a
21070   libmarblewidget4
21071   libntrack-qt4-1
21072   libntrack0
21073   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
21074   libplasmaclock4a
21075   libplasmagenericshell4
21076   libprocesscore4a
21077   libprocessui4a
21078   libqalculate5
21079   libqedje0a
21080   libqtruby4shared2
21081   libqzion0a
21082   libruby1.8
21083   libscim8c2a
21084   libsmokekdecore4-3
21085   libsmokekdeui4-3
21086   libsmokekfile3
21087   libsmokekhtml3
21088   libsmokekio3
21089   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
21090   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
21091   libsmokekparts3
21092   libsmokektexteditor3
21093   libsmokekutils3
21094   libsmokenepomuk3
21095   libsmokephonon3
21096   libsmokeplasma3
21097   libsmokeqtcore4-3
21098   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
21099   libsmokeqtgui4-3
21100   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
21101   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
21102   libsmokeqtscript4-3
21103   libsmokeqtsql4-3
21104   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
21105   libsmokeqttest4-3
21106   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
21107   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
21108   libsmokeqtxml4-3
21109   libsmokesolid3
21110   libsmokesoprano3
21111   libtaskmanager4a
21112   libtidy-0.99-0
21113   libweather-ion4a
21114   libxklavier16
21115   libxxf86misc1
21116   okteta
21117   oxygencursors
21118   plasma-dataengines-addons
21119   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
21120   plasma-widget-lancelot
21121   plasma-widgets-addons
21122   plasma-widgets-workspace
21123   polkit-kde-1
21124   ruby1.8
21125   systemsettings
21126   update-notifier-common
21127 </p></blockquote>
21128
21129 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
21130 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
21131 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
21132 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
21133
21134       </div>
21135       <div class="tags">
21136
21137
21138         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>.
21139
21140
21141       </div>
21142     </div>
21143     <div class="padding"></div>
21144
21145     <div class="entry">
21146       <div class="title">
21147         <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>
21148       </div>
21149       <div class="date">
21150         22nd November 2010
21151       </div>
21152       <div class="body">
21153         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
21154 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
21155 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
21156 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
21157 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
21158 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
21159 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
21160 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
21161 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
21162
21163 <p>I found
21164 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
21165 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
21166 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
21167 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
21168 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
21169 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
21170
21171 <pre>
21172 #!/bin/sh
21173
21174 # Based on
21175 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
21176
21177 set -e
21178 set -x
21179
21180 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
21181     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
21182     exit 1
21183 else
21184     host="$1"
21185 fi
21186
21187 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
21188     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
21189     exit 1
21190 fi
21191
21192 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
21193 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
21194 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
21195 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
21196
21197 img=$host.img
21198 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
21199 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
21200
21201 parted $img mklabel msdos
21202 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
21203 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
21204 parted $img set 1 boot on
21205
21206 modprobe dm-mod
21207 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
21208 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
21209
21210 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
21211 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
21212 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
21213
21214 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
21215 losetup -d /dev/loop0
21216 </pre>
21217
21218 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
21219 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
21220
21221 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
21222 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
21223 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
21224 seem to work just fine.</p>
21225
21226       </div>
21227       <div class="tags">
21228
21229
21230         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>.
21231
21232
21233       </div>
21234     </div>
21235     <div class="padding"></div>
21236
21237     <div class="entry">
21238       <div class="title">
21239         <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>
21240       </div>
21241       <div class="date">
21242         20th November 2010
21243       </div>
21244       <div class="body">
21245         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
21246 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
21247 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
21248 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
21249
21250 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
21251 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
21252 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
21253
21254 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
21255
21256 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
21257
21258 <blockquote><p>
21259   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
21260   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
21261   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
21262   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
21263   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
21264   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
21265   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
21266   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
21267   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
21268   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
21269   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
21270   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
21271   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
21272   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
21273   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
21274   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
21275   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
21276   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
21277   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
21278   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
21279   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
21280   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
21281   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
21282   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
21283   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
21284   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
21285   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
21286   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
21287   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
21288   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
21289   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
21290   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
21291   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
21292   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
21293   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
21294   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
21295   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
21296   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
21297   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
21298   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
21299   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
21300   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
21301   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
21302   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
21303   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
21304   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
21305   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
21306   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
21307   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
21308   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
21309   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
21310   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
21311   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
21312   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
21313   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
21314   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
21315   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
21316   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
21317   zip
21318 </p></blockquote>
21319
21320 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
21321
21322 <blockquote><p>
21323   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
21324   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
21325   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
21326   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
21327   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
21328   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
21329   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
21330   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
21331   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
21332   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
21333   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
21334   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
21335   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
21336   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
21337   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
21338   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
21339   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
21340   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
21341   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
21342   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
21343   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
21344   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
21345   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
21346   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
21347   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
21348   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
21349   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
21350   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
21351   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
21352 </p></blockquote>
21353
21354 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
21355
21356 <blockquote><p>
21357   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
21358 </p></blockquote>
21359
21360 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
21361
21362 <blockquote><p>
21363 [nothing]
21364 </p></blockquote>
21365
21366 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
21367
21368 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
21369
21370 <blockquote><p>
21371   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
21372   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
21373   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
21374   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
21375   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
21376   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
21377   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
21378   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
21379   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
21380   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
21381   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
21382   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
21383   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
21384   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
21385   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
21386   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
21387   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
21388   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
21389   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
21390   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
21391   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
21392   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
21393   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
21394   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
21395   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
21396   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
21397   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
21398   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
21399   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
21400   ttf-sazanami-gothic
21401 </p></blockquote>
21402
21403 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
21404
21405 <blockquote><p>
21406   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
21407   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
21408   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
21409   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
21410   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
21411   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
21412   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
21413   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
21414   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
21415   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
21416   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
21417   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
21418   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
21419   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
21420   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
21421   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
21422   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
21423   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
21424   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
21425   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
21426   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
21427   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
21428   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
21429   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
21430   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
21431   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
21432   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
21433   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
21434   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
21435   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
21436   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
21437   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
21438   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
21439 </p></blockquote>
21440
21441 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
21442
21443 <blockquote><p>
21444   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
21445   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
21446   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
21447   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
21448   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
21449   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
21450   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
21451 </p></blockquote>
21452
21453 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
21454
21455 <blockquote><p>
21456   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
21457 </p></blockquote>
21458
21459       </div>
21460       <div class="tags">
21461
21462
21463         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>.
21464
21465
21466       </div>
21467     </div>
21468     <div class="padding"></div>
21469
21470     <div class="entry">
21471       <div class="title">
21472         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
21473       </div>
21474       <div class="date">
21475         20th November 2010
21476       </div>
21477       <div class="body">
21478         <p>Answering
21479 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
21480 call from the Gnash project</a> for
21481 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
21482 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
21483 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
21484 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
21485 releases out more often.</p>
21486
21487 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
21488 I have considered setting up a <a
21489 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
21490 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
21491 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
21492 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
21493 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
21494 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
21495 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
21496 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
21497 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
21498 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
21499 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
21500 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
21501
21502       </div>
21503       <div class="tags">
21504
21505
21506         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>.
21507
21508
21509       </div>
21510     </div>
21511     <div class="padding"></div>
21512
21513     <div class="entry">
21514       <div class="title">
21515         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
21516       </div>
21517       <div class="date">
21518          9th November 2010
21519       </div>
21520       <div class="body">
21521         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
21522
21523 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
21524 3D linked in from
21525 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
21526 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
21527
21528       </div>
21529       <div class="tags">
21530
21531
21532         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>.
21533
21534
21535       </div>
21536     </div>
21537     <div class="padding"></div>
21538
21539     <div class="entry">
21540       <div class="title">
21541         <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>
21542       </div>
21543       <div class="date">
21544          7th November 2010
21545       </div>
21546       <div class="body">
21547         <p>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
21548 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> DVD, which is
21549 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
21550 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard.  Even
21551 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
21552 working using this DVD.</p>
21553
21554 <p>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
21555 installing recommended packages by default.  We want the same set of
21556 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
21557 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD.  I created
21558 a patch for debian-cd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/601203">BTS
21559 report #601203</a> to do this, and since this change was applied to
21560 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.</p>
21561
21562 <p>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
21563 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
21564 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
21565 Debian archive.</p>
21566
21567 <p>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
21568 were using most space.  A few large packages are well know;
21569 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont.  But I also
21570 discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
21571 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
21572 when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
21573 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
21574 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
21575 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
21576 documentation.  Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
21577 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
21578 free X driver should work.</p>
21579
21580 <p>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
21581 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
21582 DVD more useful again.</p>
21583
21584       </div>
21585       <div class="tags">
21586
21587
21588         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>.
21589
21590
21591       </div>
21592     </div>
21593     <div class="padding"></div>
21594
21595     <div class="entry">
21596       <div class="title">
21597         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
21598       </div>
21599       <div class="date">
21600         24th October 2010
21601       </div>
21602       <div class="body">
21603         <p>Some updates.</p>
21604
21605 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
21606 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
21607 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
21608 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
21609 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
21610 :)</p>
21611
21612 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
21613 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
21614 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
21615 It is called
21616 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
21617 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
21618 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
21619 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
21620 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
21621 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
21622
21623 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
21624 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
21625 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
21626 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
21627 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
21628 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
21629 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
21630 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
21631 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
21632 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
21633
21634       </div>
21635       <div class="tags">
21636
21637
21638         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>.
21639
21640
21641       </div>
21642     </div>
21643     <div class="padding"></div>
21644
21645     <div class="entry">
21646       <div class="title">
21647         <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>
21648       </div>
21649       <div class="date">
21650         19th October 2010
21651       </div>
21652       <div class="body">
21653         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is the
21654 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
21655 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
21656 funding has dried up.  I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
21657 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
21658 AVM2 flash files.</p>
21659
21660 <p>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
21661 <a href="http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">a pledge</a> with the
21662 following text:</P>
21663
21664 <p><blockquote>
21665
21666   <p>"I will pay 100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
21667   only if 10 other people will do the same."</p>
21668
21669   <p>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer</p>
21670
21671   <p>Deadline to sign up by: 24th December 2010</p>
21672
21673   <p>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
21674   format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
21675   web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
21676   format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
21677   days. The project web page is available from
21678   http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
21679   of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
21680   the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.</p>
21681
21682   <p>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
21683   time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
21684   to get this to happen.</p>
21685
21686   <p>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
21687   <a href="http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32</a> .</p>
21688
21689 </blockquote></p>
21690
21691 <p>I hope you will support this effort too.  I hope more than 10
21692 people will participate to make this happen.  The more money the
21693 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
21694 :)</p>
21695
21696       </div>
21697       <div class="tags">
21698
21699
21700         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>.
21701
21702
21703       </div>
21704     </div>
21705     <div class="padding"></div>
21706
21707     <div class="entry">
21708       <div class="title">
21709         <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>
21710       </div>
21711       <div class="date">
21712          9th October 2010
21713       </div>
21714       <div class="body">
21715         <p>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
21716 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
21717 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
21718 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
21719 I've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
21720 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
21721 robots.</p>
21722
21723 <p>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
21724 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them.  There are
21725 a few less important features too.</p>
21726
21727 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
21728 but I never got around to releasing the current source.  I decided
21729 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
21730 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.</p>
21731
21732 <p>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
21733 published the source and deb.  If you got a spykee robot, grab the
21734 source or binary package:</p>
21735
21736 <p><ul>
21737 <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>
21738 <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>
21739 <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>
21740 </ul></p>
21741
21742 <p>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
21743 please let me know.</p>
21744
21745       </div>
21746       <div class="tags">
21747
21748
21749         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>.
21750
21751
21752       </div>
21753     </div>
21754     <div class="padding"></div>
21755
21756     <div class="entry">
21757       <div class="title">
21758         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html">Links for 2010-10-03</a>
21759       </div>
21760       <div class="date">
21761          3rd October 2010
21762       </div>
21763       <div class="body">
21764         <p><ul>
21765
21766 <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
21767 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly</a></li>
21768
21769 <li>Scanner looking under clothes
21770 <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/10/03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/13667192/">has
21771 already been misused at Heathrow</a>.</li>
21772
21773 <li><a href="http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell">Landell
21774 Webcasting</a> - interesting alternative for
21775 <ahref="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">DVSwitch</a> with
21776 simple setup.
21777
21778 </ul></p>
21779
21780       </div>
21781       <div class="tags">
21782
21783
21784         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>.
21785
21786
21787       </div>
21788     </div>
21789     <div class="padding"></div>
21790
21791     <div class="entry">
21792       <div class="title">
21793         <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>
21794       </div>
21795       <div class="date">
21796          9th September 2010
21797       </div>
21798       <div class="body">
21799         <p>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
21800 camera, a Canon IXUS 130.  It was instructive and very disturbing to
21801 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
21802 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
21803 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
21804 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway.  What is the
21805 problem, you might ask?  It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the
21806 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
21807 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
21808
21809 <p>On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
21810 written:</p>
21811
21812 <blockquote>
21813 <p>This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard
21814 and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding
21815 MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and
21816 non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the
21817 AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video.</p>
21818
21819 <p>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4
21820 standard.</p>
21821 </blockquote>
21822
21823 <p>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
21824 (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
21825 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
21826 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.</p>
21827
21828 <p>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
21829 read
21830 "<a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA">Why
21831 Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
21832 MPEG-LA</a>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
21833 "<a href="http://webmink.com/2010/09/03/h-264-and-foss/">H.264 Is Not
21834 The Sort Of Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
21835 the issue.  The solution is to support the
21836 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
21837 open standards</a> for video, like <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg
21838 Theora</a>, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.</p>
21839
21840       </div>
21841       <div class="tags">
21842
21843
21844         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
21845
21846
21847       </div>
21848     </div>
21849     <div class="padding"></div>
21850
21851     <div class="entry">
21852       <div class="title">
21853         <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>
21854       </div>
21855       <div class="date">
21856          4th September 2010
21857       </div>
21858       <div class="body">
21859         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
21860 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
21861 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
21862 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
21863 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
21864 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
21865 installed.</p>
21866
21867 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
21868 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
21869 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
21870 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
21871 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
21872 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
21873 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
21874 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
21875 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
21876
21877 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
21878 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
21879 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
21880 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
21881 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
21882 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
21883 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
21884 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
21885 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
21886 pages they want to visit.</p>
21887
21888 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
21889 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
21890 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
21891 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
21892 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
21893 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
21894 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
21895 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
21896 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
21897 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
21898 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
21899
21900       </div>
21901       <div class="tags">
21902
21903
21904         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>.
21905
21906
21907       </div>
21908     </div>
21909     <div class="padding"></div>
21910
21911     <div class="entry">
21912       <div class="title">
21913         <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>
21914       </div>
21915       <div class="date">
21916          1st September 2010
21917       </div>
21918       <div class="body">
21919         <p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
21920 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
21921 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
21922 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
21923 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
21924 allow me to drive the robot around.  I picked PerlQt as I have had
21925 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
21926 browsing the web for examples.  Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
21927 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
21928 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
21929 libqt-perl.  Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
21930 drive around.</p>
21931
21932 <p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
21933 controlling the robot.  Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
21934
21935 <p><pre>
21936 use Spykee;
21937 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
21938 my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
21939 my $spykee = Spykee->new();
21940 $spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
21941 $spykee->left();
21942 sleep 2;
21943 $spykee->right();
21944 sleep 2;
21945 $spykee->forward();
21946 sleep 2;
21947 $spykee->back();
21948 sleep 2;
21949 $spykee->stop();
21950 </pre></p>
21951
21952 <p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
21953 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
21954 implement the protocol used by the robot.  I've implemented several of
21955 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
21956 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote.  First I
21957 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
21958 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
21959 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
21960 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
21961 going. :).</p>
21962
21963 <p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
21964 where to make it available first.  I will add a link to
21965 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
21966 those that want to check back later to find it.</p>
21967
21968       </div>
21969       <div class="tags">
21970
21971
21972         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>.
21973
21974
21975       </div>
21976     </div>
21977     <div class="padding"></div>
21978
21979     <div class="entry">
21980       <div class="title">
21981         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken hard link handling with sshfs</a>
21982       </div>
21983       <div class="date">
21984         30th August 2010
21985       </div>
21986       <div class="body">
21987         <p>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
21988 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">previous
21989 post about sshfs</a>.  He reported another problem with sshfs.  It
21990 fail to handle hard links properly.  A simple way to spot this is to
21991 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree.  These should have
21992 a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1.  I just tested to see
21993 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:</p>
21994
21995 <pre>
21996 % ln foo bar
21997 ln: creating hard link `bar' => `foo': Function not implemented
21998 %
21999 </pre>
22000
22001 <p>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
22002 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
22003 avoid surprised unix programs.  Not as useful as working file locking
22004 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
22005 nevertheless. :)</p>
22006
22007 <p>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
22008 git from
22009 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a></p>
22010
22011       </div>
22012       <div class="tags">
22013
22014
22015         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>.
22016
22017
22018       </div>
22019     </div>
22020     <div class="padding"></div>
22021
22022     <div class="entry">
22023       <div class="title">
22024         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken umask handling with sshfs</a>
22025       </div>
22026       <div class="date">
22027         26th August 2010
22028       </div>
22029       <div class="body">
22030         <p>My file system sematics program
22031 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">presented
22032 a few days ago</a> is very useful to verify that a file system can
22033 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit.  I'm
22034 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
22035 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs.  My friend
22036 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
22037 Edu, but stopped because of problems.  I asked today what the problems
22038 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
22039 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
22040 script:</p>
22041
22042 <pre>
22043 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
22044   mode_t retval = 0;
22045   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
22046   if (-1 != fd) {
22047     unlink(name);
22048     struct stat statbuf;
22049     if (-1 != fstat(fd, &statbuf)) {
22050       retval = statbuf.st_mode & 0x1ff;
22051     }
22052     close(fd);
22053   }
22054   return retval;
22055 }
22056
22057 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
22058 int test_umask(void) {
22059   printf("info: testing umask effect on file creation\n");
22060
22061   mode_t orig_umask = umask(000);
22062   mode_t newmode;
22063   if (0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
22064     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 000\n",
22065            newmode);
22066   }
22067   umask(007);
22068   if (0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
22069     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 007\n",
22070            newmode);
22071   }
22072
22073   umask (orig_umask);
22074   return 0;
22075 }
22076
22077 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
22078   [...]
22079   test_umask();
22080   return 0;
22081 }
22082 </pre>
22083
22084 <p>Sure enough.  On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:</p>
22085
22086 <pre>
22087 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
22088 info: testing symlink creation
22089 info: testing subdirectory creation
22090 info: testing fcntl locking
22091   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
22092   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
22093   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
22094   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
22095   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
22096   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
22097 info: testing umask effect on file creation
22098 </pre>
22099
22100 <p>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
22101 result:</p>
22102
22103 <pre>
22104 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
22105 info: testing symlink creation
22106 info: testing subdirectory creation
22107 info: testing fcntl locking
22108   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
22109   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
22110   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
22111   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
22112   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
22113   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
22114 info: testing umask effect on file creation
22115   error: Wrong file mode 644 when creating using mode 666 and umask 000
22116   error: Wrong file mode 640 when creating using mode 666 and umask 007
22117 </pre>
22118
22119 <p>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
22120 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
22121 directory.</p>
22122
22123 <p>Update 2010-08-26: Reported the issue in
22124 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/594498">BTS report #594498</a></p>
22125
22126 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
22127 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
22128 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
22129
22130       </div>
22131       <div class="tags">
22132
22133
22134         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>.
22135
22136
22137       </div>
22138     </div>
22139     <div class="padding"></div>
22140
22141     <div class="entry">
22142       <div class="title">
22143         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html">Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent</a>
22144       </div>
22145       <div class="date">
22146         15th August 2010
22147       </div>
22148       <div class="body">
22149         <p>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
22150 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html">how
22151 to crush dissent</a> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
22152 well.  Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
22153 should go down.  In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
22154 long time.</p>
22155
22156       </div>
22157       <div class="tags">
22158
22159
22160         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>.
22161
22162
22163       </div>
22164     </div>
22165     <div class="padding"></div>
22166
22167     <div class="entry">
22168       <div class="title">
22169         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html">No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</a>
22170       </div>
22171       <div class="date">
22172          9th August 2010
22173       </div>
22174       <div class="body">
22175         <p>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
22176 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
22177 configuration settings on the clients.  I believe the work to be
22178 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
22179 generated configuration.</p>
22180
22181 <p>What is the point, you might ask?  The point is to allow a Debian
22182 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
22183 without any manual configuration.</p>
22184
22185 <p>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
22186 the University of Oslo using PXE.  With the PXE installation, I am
22187 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
22188 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
22189 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
22190 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret).  After answering
22191 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
22192 after around 50 minutes it is done.  I press enter to finish the
22193 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE.  When the machine is
22194 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
22195 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
22196 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
22197 same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop.  At no point during
22198 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
22199 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
22200 fetched via DHCP and DNS.  The roaming workstation is now ready for
22201 use.</p>
22202
22203 <p>How was this done, you might wonder?  First of all, here is the
22204 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
22205 working properly out of the box:</p>
22206
22207 <ul>
22208 <li>IP address/netmask and DNS server.</li>
22209 <li>Web proxy URL.</li>
22210 <li>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).</li>
22211 <li>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.</li>
22212 <li>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)</li>
22213 <li>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)</li>
22214 <li>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)</li>
22215 </ul>
22216
22217 <p>(Hm, did I forget anything?  Let me knew if I did.)</p>
22218
22219 <p>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
22220 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
22221 administrators to track their machines.  Since yesterday, everything
22222 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
22223 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.</p>
22224
22225 <p>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
22226 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
22227 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
22228 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
22229 /etc/apt/apt.conf.  I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
22230 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
22231 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
22232 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.</p>
22233
22234 <p>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
22235 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot.  First the
22236 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain.  If
22237 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead.  If an
22238 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
22239 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
22240 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS.  If there are several
22241 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
22242 LDAP subtree is used as the base.  If defaultNamingContext is missing,
22243 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
22244 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
22245 such an object is used as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
22246 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
22247 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record.  I've been unable to find a way to
22248 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
22249 current DNS domain is used.</p>
22250
22251 <p>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
22252 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
22253 found.  This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
22254 Oslo.  A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
22255 server, but have not been implemented yet.  I decided to fetch and
22256 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
22257 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
22258 log in nor the passwords required to log in.  Usernames and passwords
22259 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
22260 network, and will not change as the laptop move around.  For a
22261 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
22262 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much.  Perhaps we
22263 should switch those to use sssd too?</p>
22264
22265 <p>The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
22266 located when the user logs in for the first time.  The LDAP server is
22267 consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
22268 attribute is used if found.  If it isn't found, the home directory
22269 path fetched from NSS is used instead.  Assuming the path is of the
22270 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
22271 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
22272 smb://server.domain/username.  This algorithm works for both Debian
22273 edu and the University of Oslo.  Perhaps there are better attributes
22274 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
22275 do for now. :)</p>
22276
22277 <p>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
22278 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
22279 more flexible than before.  I suspect it will also work for thin
22280 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
22281 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
22282 yet.</p>
22283
22284 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
22285 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
22286
22287 <p>Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
22288 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
22289 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name.  Will have to
22290 implement it for Debian Edu. :)</p>
22291
22292       </div>
22293       <div class="tags">
22294
22295
22296         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>.
22297
22298
22299       </div>
22300     </div>
22301     <div class="padding"></div>
22302
22303     <div class="entry">
22304       <div class="title">
22305         <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>
22306       </div>
22307       <div class="date">
22308          8th August 2010
22309       </div>
22310       <div class="body">
22311         <p>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
22312 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
22313 Edu/Skolelinux machines.  This was thought to be no problem, as the
22314 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
22315 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
22316 mount home directories without any problems.  But, after months of
22317 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.</p>
22318
22319 <p>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
22320 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
22321 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
22322 underlying file system is a unix file system.  When using a Windows
22323 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
22324 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
22325 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.</p>
22326
22327 <p>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
22328 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
22329 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
22330 it should.  If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
22331 help you find your way out again.  This is the fs-test.c source:</p>
22332
22333 <pre>
22334 /*
22335  * Some tests to check the file system sematics.  Used to verify that
22336  * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
22337  * directory.
22338  * License: GPL v2 or later
22339  *
22340  * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
22341  * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
22342 */
22343
22344 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
22345 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
22346 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1
22347
22348 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
22349
22350 #include &lt;errno.h>
22351 #include &lt;fcntl.h>
22352 #include &lt;stdio.h>
22353 #include &lt;string.h>
22354 #include &lt;stdlib.h>
22355 #include &lt;sys/file.h>
22356 #include &lt;sys/stat.h>
22357 #include &lt;sys/types.h>
22358 #include &lt;unistd.h>
22359
22360 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
22361 /*
22362  * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
22363  * package and linking with -lsqlite3.  A more low level test is
22364  * below.
22365  * See also &lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
22366  */
22367 #include &lt;sqlite3.h>
22368 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
22369   "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
22370 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
22371   char *zErrMsg;
22372   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
22373   sqlite3 *db=NULL;
22374   unlink(name);
22375   int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
22376   if( rc ){
22377     printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
22378     sqlite3_close(db);
22379     return -1;
22380   }
22381
22382   /* create tables */
22383   rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &zErrMsg);
22384   if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
22385     printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
22386     sqlite3_close(db);
22387     return -1;
22388   }
22389   printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
22390   sqlite3_close(db);
22391   return 0;
22392 }
22393 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
22394
22395 /*
22396  * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3.  This
22397  * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003.  This is
22398  * done in the sqlite3 library.
22399  * See also
22400  * &lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
22401  * POSIX specification
22402  * &lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
22403  */
22404 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
22405   struct flock fl;
22406   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
22407   unlink(name);
22408   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
22409   printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");
22410
22411   fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
22412   fl.l_pid    = getpid();
22413   printf("  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
22414   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
22415   fl.l_len    = 1;
22416   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
22417   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
22418
22419   printf("  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
22420   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
22421   fl.l_len    = 510;
22422   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
22423   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
22424
22425   printf("  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824");
22426   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
22427   fl.l_len    = 1;
22428   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
22429   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
22430
22431   printf("  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
22432   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
22433   fl.l_len    = 1;
22434   fl.l_type   = F_WRLCK;
22435   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
22436
22437   printf("  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
22438   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
22439   fl.l_len    = 510;
22440   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
22441
22442   printf("  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824");
22443   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
22444   fl.l_len    = 2;
22445   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
22446   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
22447
22448   close(fd);
22449   return 0;
22450 }
22451
22452 /*
22453  * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
22454  * below them.  This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
22455  * Mounting with option 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
22456  * slowing down file operations.
22457  */
22458 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
22459 #define LEVELS 5
22460   char *path = strdup("test");
22461   char *dirs[LEVELS];
22462   int level;
22463   printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
22464   for (level = 0; level &lt; LEVELS; level++) {
22465     char *newpath = NULL;
22466     if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
22467       printf("  error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
22468              path, strerror(errno));
22469       break;
22470     }
22471     asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
22472     free(path);
22473     path = newpath;
22474   }
22475   return 0;
22476 }
22477
22478 /*
22479  * Test if symlinks can be created.  This was a problem detected with
22480  * KDE.
22481  */
22482 int test_symlinks(void) {
22483   printf("info: testing symlink creation\n");
22484   unlink("symlink");
22485   if (-1 == symlink("file", "symlink"))
22486     printf("  error: Unable to create symlink\n");
22487   return 0;
22488 }
22489
22490 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
22491   printf("Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n");
22492   test_symlinks();
22493   test_subdirectory_creation();
22494 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
22495   test_sqlite_open();
22496 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
22497   test_gcompris_locking();
22498   return 0;
22499 }
22500 </pre>
22501
22502 <p>When everything is working, it should print something like
22503 this:</p>
22504
22505 <pre>
22506 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
22507 info: testing symlink creation
22508 info: testing subdirectory creation
22509 info: sqlite worked
22510 info: testing fcntl locking
22511   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
22512   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
22513   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
22514   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
22515   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
22516   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
22517 </pre>
22518
22519 <p>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
22520 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
22521 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
22522 the read-only lock (while Windows do not).  Another was a bug in the
22523 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
22524 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
22525 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
22526 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.</p>
22527
22528 <p>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
22529 it. :)</p>
22530
22531 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
22532 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
22533 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
22534
22535       </div>
22536       <div class="tags">
22537
22538
22539         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>.
22540
22541
22542       </div>
22543     </div>
22544     <div class="padding"></div>
22545
22546     <div class="entry">
22547       <div class="title">
22548         <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>
22549       </div>
22550       <div class="date">
22551          7th August 2010
22552       </div>
22553       <div class="body">
22554         <p>A few days ago, I
22555 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">tried
22556 to install</a> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
22557 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
22558 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
22559 university infrastructure.  It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
22560 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
22561 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
22562 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
22563 around it.  Now I am a huge step further along that road.</p>
22564
22565 <p>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
22566 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
22567 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
22568 servers for Kerberos authentication.  All this without any
22569 configuration at all during installation.  My users home directory got
22570 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
22571 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured.  In addition to
22572 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
22573 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
22574 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf.  Iceweasel and KDE is
22575 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
22576 a proxy when at the university network.  If the machine is moved to a
22577 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
22578 gave it a IP address.</p>
22579
22580 <p>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
22581 entry ldap.$domain.  If this do not exist, it look for the
22582 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
22583 server.  Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
22584 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
22585 pick the first one as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
22586 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
22587 uppercase version of $domain.</p>
22588
22589 <p>So, what is not working, you might ask.  SMB mounting my home
22590 directory do not work.  No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
22591 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
22592 the cause.  These are not properly configured during installation, and
22593 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
22594 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(</p>
22595
22596 <p>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
22597 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
22598 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
22599 authentication.  It should also work out of the box in a Active
22600 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
22601 with UID and GID values.</p>
22602
22603 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
22604 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
22605
22606       </div>
22607       <div class="tags">
22608
22609
22610         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>.
22611
22612
22613       </div>
22614     </div>
22615     <div class="padding"></div>
22616
22617     <div class="entry">
22618       <div class="title">
22619         <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>
22620       </div>
22621       <div class="date">
22622          3rd August 2010
22623       </div>
22624       <div class="body">
22625         <p>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
22626 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
22627 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
22628 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
22629 infrastructure.  In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
22630 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
22631 servers.</p>
22632
22633 <p>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
22634 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
22635 /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
22636 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
22637 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
22638 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
22639 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
22640 .uio.no.</p>
22641
22642 <p>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
22643 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
22644 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
22645 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
22646 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
22647 university servers.</p>
22648
22649 <p>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
22650 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
22651 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
22652 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
22653 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
22654 uses.</p>
22655
22656       </div>
22657       <div class="tags">
22658
22659
22660         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>.
22661
22662
22663       </div>
22664     </div>
22665     <div class="padding"></div>
22666
22667     <div class="entry">
22668       <div class="title">
22669         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
22670       </div>
22671       <div class="date">
22672         27th July 2010
22673       </div>
22674       <div class="body">
22675         <p>I discovered this while doing
22676 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
22677 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
22678 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
22679 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
22680 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
22681
22682 <p>An example is from todays
22683 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
22684 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
22685 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
22686 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
22687 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
22688 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
22689 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
22690
22691 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
22692
22693 <blockquote><pre>
22694 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
22695  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
22696   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
22697 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
22698  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
22699 </pre></blockquote>
22700
22701 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
22702 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
22703 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
22704 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
22705 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
22706 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
22707 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
22708 of dependency loops.</p>
22709
22710 <p>Thanks to
22711 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
22712 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
22713 dependencies
22714 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
22715 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
22716
22717 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
22718 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
22719 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
22720 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
22721 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
22722 it.</p>
22723
22724       </div>
22725       <div class="tags">
22726
22727
22728         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>.
22729
22730
22731       </div>
22732     </div>
22733     <div class="padding"></div>
22734
22735     <div class="entry">
22736       <div class="title">
22737         <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>
22738       </div>
22739       <div class="date">
22740         27th July 2010
22741       </div>
22742       <div class="body">
22743         <p>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
22744 with the next Debian Edu release.  Not nearly done, but one major step
22745 completed.</p>
22746
22747 <blockquote>
22748 <p>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
22749 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
22750 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
22751 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
22752 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
22753 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
22754 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
22755 language of choice, please let us know too.</p>
22756
22757 <p>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
22758 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
22759 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.</p>
22760
22761 <p>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
22762 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
22763 much.</p>
22764
22765 <p>Changes compared to the lenny based version</p>
22766
22767 <ul>
22768 <li>Everything from Debian Squeeze
22769 <ul>
22770   <li>Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in
22771          combination with some new artwork
22772   <li>Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
22773   <li>OpenOffice.org 3.2
22774   <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
22775   <li>Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
22776   <li>Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
22777   <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
22778   <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
22779   <li>3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
22780   <li>Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
22781 </ul></li>
22782 <li>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
22783     Enabled for:
22784 <ul>
22785   <li>PAM
22786   <li>LDAP
22787   <li>IMAP
22788   <li>SMTP (sender verification)
22789 </ul>
22790 </li>
22791 <li>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.</li>
22792 <li>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
22793     fetched from LDAP.</li>
22794 <li>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.</li>
22795 <li>General cleanup (not finished)</li>
22796 </ul>
22797 <p>The following features are not working as they should</p>
22798
22799 <ul>
22800 <li>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
22801     scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
22802     for testing.</li>
22803 <li>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
22804     and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
22805     clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.</li>
22806 <li>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.</li>
22807 <li>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.</li>
22808 <li>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.</li>
22809 <li>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
22810     netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.</li>
22811 <li>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
22812     some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
22813     jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.</li>
22814 <li>Some packages lack translations. See
22815     http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
22816     and help out with translations.</li>
22817 </ul>
22818
22819 <p>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use</p>
22820
22821 <ul>
22822 <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>
22823 <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>
22824 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
22825 </ul>
22826 <p>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use</p>
22827
22828 <ul>
22829 <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>
22830 <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>
22831 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
22832 </ul>
22833
22834 <p>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
22835 get closer to the final release.</p>
22836
22837 <p>The MD5SUM of these images are</p>
22838
22839 <ul>
22840 <li>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
22841 <li>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
22842 </ul>
22843
22844 <p>The SHA1SUM of these images are</p>
22845 <ul>
22846 <li>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
22847 <li>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
22848 </ul>
22849 <p>How to report bugs:
22850 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla</p>
22851
22852 <p>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org</p>
22853 </blockquote>
22854
22855       </div>
22856       <div class="tags">
22857
22858
22859         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>.
22860
22861
22862       </div>
22863     </div>
22864     <div class="padding"></div>
22865
22866     <div class="entry">
22867       <div class="title">
22868         <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>
22869       </div>
22870       <div class="date">
22871         25th July 2010
22872       </div>
22873       <div class="body">
22874         <p>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
22875 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
22876 Edu/Skolelinux into shape.  This future version will use Kerberos for
22877 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
22878 getting rid of password questions one at the time.</p>
22879
22880 <p>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
22881 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
22882 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
22883 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server.  This
22884 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
22885 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
22886 package.  I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.</p>
22887
22888 <p>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
22889 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
22890 password when mounting the SMB volume.  A simple click on the shortcut
22891 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
22892 up. :)</p>
22893
22894 <p>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
22895 Debian Edu.  We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
22896 also Samba.  Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.</p>
22897
22898 <p>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
22899 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
22900 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
22901 the release.  It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
22902 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
22903 time for a alpha0 release today.  As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
22904 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
22905 release another day.</p>
22906
22907 <p>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
22908 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
22909
22910       </div>
22911       <div class="tags">
22912
22913
22914         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>.
22915
22916
22917       </div>
22918     </div>
22919     <div class="padding"></div>
22920
22921     <div class="entry">
22922       <div class="title">
22923         <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>
22924       </div>
22925       <div class="date">
22926         18th July 2010
22927       </div>
22928       <div class="body">
22929         <p>Thanks to
22930 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home">todays
22931 opengeodata blog entry</a>, I just discovered that the
22932 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
22933 <a href="http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT">support
22934 for calculating routes</a>.  The support is still experimental and
22935 only available from the development server, until more experience is
22936 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.</p>
22937
22938 <p>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
22939 was provided by <a href="http://maps.cloudmade.com/">Cloudmade</a>,
22940 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
22941 the issue.  I've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
22942 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
22943 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
22944 www.openstreetmap.org front page.</p>
22945
22946       </div>
22947       <div class="tags">
22948
22949
22950         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>.
22951
22952
22953       </div>
22954     </div>
22955     <div class="padding"></div>
22956
22957     <div class="entry">
22958       <div class="title">
22959         <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>
22960       </div>
22961       <div class="date">
22962         17th July 2010
22963       </div>
22964       <div class="body">
22965         <p>This is a
22966 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
22967 on my
22968 <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
22969 work</a> on
22970 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
22971 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
22972
22973 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
22974 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
22975 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
22976 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
22977
22978 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
22979 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
22980 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
22981
22982 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
22983
22984 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
22985 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
22986 the web.
22987
22988 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
22989 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
22990 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
22991 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
22992 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
22993 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
22994
22995 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
22996 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
22997 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
22998 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
22999 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
23000 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
23001 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
23002 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
23003 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
23004 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
23005 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
23006 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
23007 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
23008 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
23009 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
23010 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
23011
23012 <blockquote><pre>
23013 ldapsearch -h ldap \
23014   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
23015   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
23016   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
23017   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
23018   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
23019   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
23020
23021 ldapsearch -h ldap \
23022   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
23023   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
23024   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
23025   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
23026   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
23027 </pre></blockquote>
23028
23029 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
23030 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
23031 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
23032 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
23033 also exist.</p>
23034
23035 <blockquote><pre>
23036 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
23037 objectclass: top
23038 objectclass: dnsdomain
23039 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
23040 dc: tjener
23041 arecord: 10.0.2.2
23042 associateddomain: tjener.intern
23043
23044 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
23045 objectclass: top
23046 objectclass: dnsdomain2
23047 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
23048 dc: 2
23049 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
23050 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
23051 </pre></blockquote>
23052
23053 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
23054 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
23055 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
23056 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
23057 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
23058 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
23059 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
23060 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
23061 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
23062 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
23063 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
23064 instead.</p>
23065
23066 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
23067 like this:</p>
23068
23069 <blockquote><pre>
23070 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
23071   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
23072   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
23073   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
23074   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
23075   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
23076
23077 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
23078   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
23079 </pre></blockquote>
23080
23081 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
23082 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
23083 reverse lookups.</p>
23084
23085 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
23086 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
23087 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
23088 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
23089
23090 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
23091 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
23092 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
23093
23094 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
23095 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
23096 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
23097 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
23098 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
23099
23100 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
23101 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
23102 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
23103 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
23104 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
23105
23106 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
23107 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
23108 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
23109 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
23110 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
23111 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
23112
23113 <blockquote><pre>
23114 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
23115     SUP top
23116     AUXILIARY
23117     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
23118           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
23119           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
23120           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
23121           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
23122     ))
23123 </pre></blockquote>
23124
23125 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
23126 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
23127 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
23128 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
23129 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
23130 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
23131
23132 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
23133
23134 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
23135 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
23136 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
23137 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
23138 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
23139
23140 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
23141 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
23142 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
23143 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
23144
23145 <blockquote><pre>
23146 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
23147 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
23148 </pre></blockquote>
23149
23150 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
23151 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
23152 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
23153 search result is this entry:</p>
23154
23155 <blockquote><pre>
23156 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
23157 cn: dhcp
23158 objectClass: top
23159 objectClass: dhcpServer
23160 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
23161 </pre></blockquote>
23162
23163 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
23164 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
23165 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
23166 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
23167 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
23168 The search result is this entry:</p>
23169
23170 <blockquote><pre>
23171 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
23172 cn: DHCP Config
23173 objectClass: top
23174 objectClass: dhcpService
23175 objectClass: dhcpOptions
23176 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
23177 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
23178 dhcpStatements: authoritative
23179 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
23180 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
23181 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
23182 </pre></blockquote>
23183
23184 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
23185 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
23186 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
23187 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
23188 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
23189 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
23190 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
23191 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
23192 related computer objects.</p>
23193
23194 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
23195 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
23196 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
23197 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
23198 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
23199 like:</p>
23200
23201 <blockquote><pre>
23202 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
23203 cn: hostname
23204 objectClass: top
23205 objectClass: dhcpHost
23206 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
23207 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
23208 </pre></blockquote>
23209
23210 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
23211 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
23212 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
23213 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
23214 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
23215 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
23216 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
23217 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
23218 structural object class.
23219
23220 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
23221
23222 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
23223 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
23224 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
23225 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
23226 in the configuration.</p>
23227
23228 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
23229 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
23230 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
23231 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
23232 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
23233 structure.</p>
23234
23235 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
23236 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
23237
23238 <blockquote><pre>
23239 ou=services
23240   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
23241     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
23242     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
23243       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
23244         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
23245     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
23246       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
23247         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
23248     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
23249       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
23250 </pre></blockquote>
23251
23252 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
23253 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
23254 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
23255 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
23256
23257 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
23258 like this:</p>
23259
23260 <blockquote><pre>
23261 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
23262 dc: hostname
23263 objectClass: top
23264 objectClass: dhcpHost
23265 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
23266 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
23267 associateddomain: hostname.intern
23268 arecord: 10.11.12.13
23269 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
23270 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
23271 </pre></blockquote>
23272
23273 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
23274 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
23275 auxiliary object class.</p>
23276
23277       </div>
23278       <div class="tags">
23279
23280
23281         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>.
23282
23283
23284       </div>
23285     </div>
23286     <div class="padding"></div>
23287
23288     <div class="entry">
23289       <div class="title">
23290         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
23291       </div>
23292       <div class="date">
23293         14th July 2010
23294       </div>
23295       <div class="body">
23296         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
23297 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
23298 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
23299 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
23300 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
23301
23302 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
23303 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
23304
23305 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
23306 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
23307 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
23308 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
23309 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
23310 to a slave DNS server.</p>
23311
23312 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
23313 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
23314 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
23315 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
23316 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
23317 seem to work.</p>
23318
23319 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
23320 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
23321 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
23322 this:</p>
23323
23324 <blockquote><pre>
23325   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
23326   cn: hostname
23327   objectClass: dhcphost
23328   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
23329   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
23330   associateddomain: hostname.intern
23331   arecord: 10.11.12.13
23332   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
23333   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
23334   ldapconfigsound: Y
23335 </pre></blockquote>
23336
23337 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
23338 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
23339 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
23340 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
23341
23342 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
23343 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
23344 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
23345 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
23346 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
23347 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
23348 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
23349 might be a good place to put it.</p>
23350
23351 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
23352 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
23353
23354       </div>
23355       <div class="tags">
23356
23357
23358         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>.
23359
23360
23361       </div>
23362     </div>
23363     <div class="padding"></div>
23364
23365     <div class="entry">
23366       <div class="title">
23367         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
23368       </div>
23369       <div class="date">
23370         11th July 2010
23371       </div>
23372       <div class="body">
23373         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
23374 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
23375 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
23376 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
23377
23378 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
23379 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
23380 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
23381 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
23382 LTSP clients.</p>
23383
23384 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
23385 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
23386 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
23387
23388 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
23389 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
23390 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
23391
23392 <blockquote><pre>
23393 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
23394 #
23395 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
23396 #
23397 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
23398 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
23399 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
23400 #
23401 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
23402 # existence of attribute names.
23403 #
23404 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
23405 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
23406 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
23407 #
23408 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
23409 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
23410 #
23411 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
23412 #     SUP top
23413 #     AUXILIARY
23414 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
23415
23416 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
23417 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
23418     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
23419     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
23420         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
23421         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
23422             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
23423             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
23424             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
23425             # bass value on to clients
23426             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
23427         done
23428     done
23429 fi
23430 </pre></blockquote>
23431
23432 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
23433 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
23434 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
23435 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
23436 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
23437
23438 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
23439 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
23440
23441 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
23442 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
23443 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
23444 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
23445 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
23446 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
23447
23448       </div>
23449       <div class="tags">
23450
23451
23452         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>.
23453
23454
23455       </div>
23456     </div>
23457     <div class="padding"></div>
23458
23459     <div class="entry">
23460       <div class="title">
23461         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
23462       </div>
23463       <div class="date">
23464          9th July 2010
23465       </div>
23466       <div class="body">
23467         <p>Since
23468 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
23469 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
23470 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
23471 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
23472 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
23473 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
23474 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
23475 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
23476 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
23477 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
23478 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
23479 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
23480 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
23481
23482       </div>
23483       <div class="tags">
23484
23485
23486         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>.
23487
23488
23489       </div>
23490     </div>
23491     <div class="padding"></div>
23492
23493     <div class="entry">
23494       <div class="title">
23495         <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>
23496       </div>
23497       <div class="date">
23498          3rd July 2010
23499       </div>
23500       <div class="body">
23501         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
23502 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
23503 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
23504 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
23505 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
23506 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
23507 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
23508 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
23509
23510 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
23511 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
23512 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
23513 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
23514 publish the difference.</p>
23515
23516 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
23517
23518 <blockquote><p>
23519   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
23520   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
23521   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
23522   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
23523   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
23524   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
23525   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
23526   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
23527 </p></blockquote>
23528
23529 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
23530
23531 <blockquote><p>
23532   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
23533   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
23534   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
23535   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
23536   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
23537   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
23538   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
23539   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
23540   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
23541   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
23542   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
23543   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
23544   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
23545   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
23546   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
23547   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
23548   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
23549   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
23550   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
23551   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
23552 </p></blockquote>
23553
23554 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
23555
23556 <blockquote><p>
23557   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
23558   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
23559   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
23560   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
23561   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
23562   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
23563   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
23564   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
23565   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
23566   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
23567   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
23568   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
23569   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
23570   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
23571   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
23572   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
23573   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
23574   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
23575   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
23576   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
23577   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
23578 </p></blockquote>
23579
23580 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
23581
23582 <blockquote><p>
23583   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
23584   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
23585   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
23586 </p></blockquote>
23587
23588 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
23589 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
23590 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
23591 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
23592 the difference somewhat.
23593
23594       </div>
23595       <div class="tags">
23596
23597
23598         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>.
23599
23600
23601       </div>
23602     </div>
23603     <div class="padding"></div>
23604
23605     <div class="entry">
23606       <div class="title">
23607         <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>
23608       </div>
23609       <div class="date">
23610          1st July 2010
23611       </div>
23612       <div class="body">
23613         <p>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
23614 a bit troubling.  Laptops are typically used also when not connected
23615 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
23616 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
23617 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
23618 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
23619 in Debian.  Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
23620 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
23621 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.</p>
23622
23623 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
23624
23625 This is the traditional method with a twist.  The password caching is
23626 provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
23627 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd.  The directory
23628 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP.  If one want to use
23629 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
23630 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal.  If one is happy having a
23631 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
23632 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
23633 using libpam-mklocaluser.  A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
23634 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
23635 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/568577">bug #568577</a> is in the
23636 archive.  Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
23637 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
23638 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/.  This
23639 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.</p>
23640
23641 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured</p>
23642
23643 <blockquote><pre>
23644 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
23645 </pre></blockquote>
23646
23647 <p>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
23648 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site.  Make sure the
23649 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
23650 sent in clear text to the LDAP server.  I've been unable to get TLS
23651 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
23652 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
23653 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
23654 on how to get this working.</p>
23655
23656 <p>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
23657 caching until <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">bug #485282</a>
23658 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
23659 currently in /etc/nscd.conf.  The changes are in the fields
23660 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
23661 instructions I found in the
23662 <a href="http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/">LDAP for Mobile Laptops</a>
23663 instructions by Flyn Computing.</p>
23664
23665 <blockquote><pre>
23666         debug-level             0
23667         reload-count            unlimited
23668         paranoia                no
23669
23670         enable-cache            passwd          yes
23671         positive-time-to-live   passwd          2592000
23672         negative-time-to-live   passwd          20
23673         suggested-size          passwd          211
23674         check-files             passwd          yes
23675         persistent              passwd          yes
23676         shared                  passwd          yes
23677         max-db-size             passwd          33554432
23678         auto-propagate          passwd          yes
23679
23680         enable-cache            group           yes
23681         positive-time-to-live   group           2592000
23682         negative-time-to-live   group           20
23683         suggested-size          group           211
23684         check-files             group           yes
23685         persistent              group           yes
23686         shared                  group           yes
23687         max-db-size             group           33554432
23688         auto-propagate          group           yes
23689
23690         enable-cache            hosts           no
23691         positive-time-to-live   hosts           2592000
23692         negative-time-to-live   hosts           20
23693         suggested-size          hosts           211
23694         check-files             hosts           yes
23695         persistent              hosts           yes
23696         shared                  hosts           yes
23697         max-db-size             hosts           33554432
23698
23699         enable-cache            services        yes
23700         positive-time-to-live   services        2592000
23701         negative-time-to-live   services        20
23702         suggested-size          services        211
23703         check-files             services        yes
23704         persistent              services        yes
23705         shared                  services        yes
23706         max-db-size             services        33554432
23707 </pre></blockquote>
23708
23709 <p>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
23710 automatically like the one provided in
23711 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/496915">bug #496915</a>, the file
23712 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
23713 directory service on the machine.  /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
23714 look like this:</p>
23715
23716 <blockquote><pre>
23717 passwd:         files ldap
23718 group:          files ldap
23719 shadow:         files ldap
23720 hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
23721 networks:       files
23722 protocols:      files
23723 services:       files
23724 ethers:         files
23725 rpc:            files
23726 netgroup:       files ldap
23727 </pre></blockquote>
23728
23729 <p>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
23730 shadow and netgroup.</p>
23731
23732 <p>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
23733 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
23734 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
23735 attributes cached.
23736
23737 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
23738   libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
23739
23740 <p>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
23741 problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to
23742 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
23743 LDAP database is available.  I have not tested such setup, because I
23744 discovered sssd.</p>
23745
23746 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser</h2>
23747
23748 <p>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
23749 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
23750 <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/">sssd</a> package from Redhat.
23751 It is part of the <a href="http://www.freeipa.org/">FreeIPA</A> project
23752 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
23753 machines.  The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
23754 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
23755 libpam-ccreds.  It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS.  Version
23756 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
23757 in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010.  Because the
23758 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd package</a>
23759 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
23760 version 1.2 is now in testing.
23761
23762 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
23763 roaming setup I want</p>
23764
23765 <blockquote><pre>
23766 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
23767 </pre></blockquote>
23768
23769 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
23770 <tt>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf</tt>.
23771
23772 <blockquote><pre>
23773 [sssd]
23774 config_file_version = 2
23775 reconnection_retries = 3
23776 sbus_timeout = 30
23777 services = nss, pam
23778 domains = INTERN
23779
23780 [nss]
23781 filter_groups = root
23782 filter_users = root
23783 reconnection_retries = 3
23784
23785 [pam]
23786 reconnection_retries = 3
23787
23788 [domain/INTERN]
23789 enumerate = false
23790 cache_credentials = true
23791
23792 id_provider = ldap
23793 auth_provider = ldap
23794 chpass_provider = ldap
23795
23796 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
23797 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
23798 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
23799 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
23800 </pre></blockquote>
23801
23802 <p>I got the same problem here with certificate checking.  Had to set
23803 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working.</p>
23804
23805 <p>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
23806 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
23807 modify it manually.</p>
23808
23809 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
23810 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
23811
23812       </div>
23813       <div class="tags">
23814
23815
23816         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>.
23817
23818
23819       </div>
23820     </div>
23821     <div class="padding"></div>
23822
23823     <div class="entry">
23824       <div class="title">
23825         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
23826       </div>
23827       <div class="date">
23828         28th June 2010
23829       </div>
23830       <div class="body">
23831         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
23832 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
23833 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
23834 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
23835 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
23836 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
23837 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
23838 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
23839 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
23840 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
23841
23842 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
23843 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
23844 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
23845 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
23846 released.</p>
23847
23848 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
23849 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
23850 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
23851 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
23852
23853 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
23854 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
23855
23856 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
23857 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
23858 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
23859 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
23860 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
23861
23862       </div>
23863       <div class="tags">
23864
23865
23866         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
23867
23868
23869       </div>
23870     </div>
23871     <div class="padding"></div>
23872
23873     <div class="entry">
23874       <div class="title">
23875         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
23876       </div>
23877       <div class="date">
23878         24th June 2010
23879       </div>
23880       <div class="body">
23881         <p>A while back, I
23882 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
23883 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
23884 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
23885 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
23886
23887 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
23888 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
23889 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
23890 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
23891
23892 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
23893 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
23894 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
23895 Debian Edu.</p>
23896
23897 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
23898 the
23899 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
23900 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
23901 available today from IETF.</p>
23902
23903 <pre>
23904 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
23905 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
23906 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
23907  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
23908         NAME 'dhcpHost'
23909         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
23910 -       SUP top
23911 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
23912         MUST cn
23913         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
23914         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
23915 </pre>
23916
23917 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
23918 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
23919 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
23920
23921 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
23922 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
23923
23924       </div>
23925       <div class="tags">
23926
23927
23928         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>.
23929
23930
23931       </div>
23932     </div>
23933     <div class="padding"></div>
23934
23935     <div class="entry">
23936       <div class="title">
23937         <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>
23938       </div>
23939       <div class="date">
23940         16th June 2010
23941       </div>
23942       <div class="body">
23943         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
23944 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
23945 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
23946 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
23947 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
23948 this:
23949
23950 <blockquote><pre>
23951 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
23952 tasksel --new-install
23953 </pre></blockquote>
23954
23955 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
23956 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
23957 any output what so ever.
23958
23959 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
23960 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
23961 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
23962 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
23963 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
23964 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
23965 code like this:
23966
23967 <blockquote><pre>
23968 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
23969 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
23970 $cmd
23971 </pre></blockquote>
23972
23973 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
23974 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
23975 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
23976 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
23977 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
23978 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
23979 installation.</p>
23980
23981 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
23982 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
23983 like this.</p>
23984
23985       </div>
23986       <div class="tags">
23987
23988
23989         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>.
23990
23991
23992       </div>
23993     </div>
23994     <div class="padding"></div>
23995
23996     <div class="entry">
23997       <div class="title">
23998         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">Officeshots taking shape</a>
23999       </div>
24000       <div class="date">
24001         13th June 2010
24002       </div>
24003       <div class="body">
24004         <p>For those of us caring about document exchange and
24005 interoperability, <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>
24006 is a great service.  It is to ODF documents what
24007 <a href="http://browsershots.org/">BrowserShots</a> is for web
24008 pages.</p>
24009
24010 <p>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
24011 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
24012 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
24013 interested in supporting the project.  I helped him to navigate his
24014 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
24015 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
24016 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot.  The machine is
24017 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
24018 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
24019 see how the project is doing.</p>
24020
24021 <p>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
24022 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
24023 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
24024 in 17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
24025 Windows.  This is great.</p>
24026
24027       </div>
24028       <div class="tags">
24029
24030
24031         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>.
24032
24033
24034       </div>
24035     </div>
24036     <div class="padding"></div>
24037
24038     <div class="entry">
24039       <div class="title">
24040         <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>
24041       </div>
24042       <div class="date">
24043         13th June 2010
24044       </div>
24045       <div class="body">
24046         <p>My
24047 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
24048 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
24049 finally made the upgrade logs available from
24050 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
24051 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
24052 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
24053 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
24054
24055 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
24056 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
24057 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
24058 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
24059 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
24060 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
24061 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
24062 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
24063
24064 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
24065 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
24066 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
24067 too surprising.</p>
24068
24069 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
24070 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
24071 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
24072 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
24073 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
24074 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
24075 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
24076 continue.</p>
24077
24078 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
24079 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
24080   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
24081   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
24082   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
24083   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
24084   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
24085   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
24086   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
24087   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
24088   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
24089   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
24090   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
24091   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
24092   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
24093   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
24094   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
24095   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
24096   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
24097   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
24098   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
24099   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
24100   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
24101   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
24102   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
24103   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
24104   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
24105   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
24106   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
24107   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
24108
24109 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
24110
24111 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
24112   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
24113   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
24114   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
24115   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
24116   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
24117   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
24118   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
24119   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
24120   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
24121   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
24122   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
24123   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
24124   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
24125   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
24126   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
24127   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
24128   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
24129   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
24130   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
24131   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
24132   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
24133   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
24134   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
24135   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
24136   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
24137   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
24138   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
24139   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
24140   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
24141   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
24142   zip</p>
24143
24144 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
24145
24146 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
24147   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
24148   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
24149   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
24150   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
24151   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
24152   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
24153   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
24154   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
24155   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
24156   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
24157   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
24158   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
24159   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
24160   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
24161   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
24162   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
24163   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
24164   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
24165   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
24166   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
24167   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
24168   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
24169   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
24170   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
24171   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
24172   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
24173   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
24174
24175 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
24176 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
24177   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
24178   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
24179   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
24180   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
24181   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
24182   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
24183   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
24184   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
24185   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
24186   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
24187   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
24188   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
24189   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
24190   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
24191   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
24192   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
24193   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
24194   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
24195   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
24196   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
24197   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
24198   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
24199   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
24200   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
24201   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
24202   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
24203   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
24204   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
24205   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
24206   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
24207   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
24208   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
24209   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
24210   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
24211   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
24212   xulrunner-1.9</p>
24213
24214
24215       </div>
24216       <div class="tags">
24217
24218
24219         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>.
24220
24221
24222       </div>
24223     </div>
24224     <div class="padding"></div>
24225
24226     <div class="entry">
24227       <div class="title">
24228         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
24229       </div>
24230       <div class="date">
24231         11th June 2010
24232       </div>
24233       <div class="body">
24234         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
24235 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
24236 have been discovered and reported in the process
24237 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
24238 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
24239 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
24240 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
24241 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
24242
24243 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
24244 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
24245 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
24246 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
24247 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
24248 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
24249
24250 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
24251 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
24252 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
24253 is created.  The bug report
24254 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
24255 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
24256 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
24257 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
24258 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
24259 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
24260 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
24261 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
24262 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
24263 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
24264 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
24265 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
24266 Debian Squeeze.</p>
24267
24268 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
24269 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
24270 trick:</p>
24271
24272 <blockquote><pre>
24273 #!/bin/sh
24274 set -ex
24275
24276 if [ "$1" ] ; then
24277     desktop=$1
24278 else
24279     desktop=gnome
24280 fi
24281
24282 from=lenny
24283 to=squeeze
24284
24285 exec &lt; /dev/null
24286 unset LANG
24287 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
24288 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
24289 fuser -mv .
24290 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
24291 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
24292 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
24293 #!/bin/sh
24294 exit 101
24295 EOF
24296 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
24297 exit_cleanup() {
24298     umount $tmpdir/proc
24299 }
24300 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
24301 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
24302 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
24303
24304 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
24305
24306 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
24307 # to return the correct answers.
24308 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
24309     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
24310
24311 # Include the desktop and laptop task
24312 for test in desktop laptop ; do
24313     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
24314 #!/bin/sh
24315 exit 2
24316 EOF
24317     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
24318 done
24319
24320 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
24321 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
24322 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
24323 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
24324
24325 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
24326 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
24327 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
24328 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
24329 fuser -mv
24330 </pre></blockquote>
24331
24332 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
24333 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
24334 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
24335 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
24336 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
24337 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
24338
24339 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
24340 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
24341 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
24342 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
24343 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
24344 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
24345 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
24346
24347 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
24348 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
24349 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
24350 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
24351 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
24352 packages.</p>
24353
24354       </div>
24355       <div class="tags">
24356
24357
24358         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>.
24359
24360
24361       </div>
24362     </div>
24363     <div class="padding"></div>
24364
24365     <div class="entry">
24366       <div class="title">
24367         <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>
24368       </div>
24369       <div class="date">
24370          6th June 2010
24371       </div>
24372       <div class="body">
24373         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
24374 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
24375 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
24376 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
24377 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
24378 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
24379 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
24380
24381 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
24382 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
24383 COLUMNS):</p>
24384
24385 <blockquote><pre>
24386 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
24387 previous=N
24388 PREVLEVEL=
24389 RUNLEVEL=
24390 runlevel=S
24391 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
24392 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
24393 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
24394 </pre></blockquote>
24395
24396 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
24397 script.</p>
24398
24399 <blockquote><pre>
24400 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
24401 previous=N
24402 PREVLEVEL=N
24403 RUNLEVEL=S
24404 runlevel=S
24405 </pre></blockquote>
24406
24407 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
24408 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
24409 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
24410
24411 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
24412 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
24413 choice.</p>
24414
24415       </div>
24416       <div class="tags">
24417
24418
24419         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>.
24420
24421
24422       </div>
24423     </div>
24424     <div class="padding"></div>
24425
24426     <div class="entry">
24427       <div class="title">
24428         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
24429       </div>
24430       <div class="date">
24431          6th June 2010
24432       </div>
24433       <div class="body">
24434         <p>Via the
24435 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
24436 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
24437 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
24438 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
24439 following the standards wars of today.</p>
24440
24441       </div>
24442       <div class="tags">
24443
24444
24445         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>.
24446
24447
24448       </div>
24449     </div>
24450     <div class="padding"></div>
24451
24452     <div class="entry">
24453       <div class="title">
24454         <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>
24455       </div>
24456       <div class="date">
24457          3rd June 2010
24458       </div>
24459       <div class="body">
24460         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
24461 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
24462 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
24463 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
24464 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
24465
24466 <blockquote><pre>
24467 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
24468   vendor                    count
24469   Dell Computer Corporation     1
24470     PowerEdge 1750              1
24471   IBM                           1
24472     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
24473   Intel                         2
24474   [no-dmi-info]                 3
24475 maintainer:~#
24476 </pre></blockquote>
24477
24478 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
24479 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
24480 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
24481 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
24482 option to list the individual machines.</p>
24483
24484 <p>A larger list is
24485 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
24486 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
24487 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
24488 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
24489 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
24490 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
24491 collector.</p>
24492
24493       </div>
24494       <div class="tags">
24495
24496
24497         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>.
24498
24499
24500       </div>
24501     </div>
24502     <div class="padding"></div>
24503
24504     <div class="entry">
24505       <div class="title">
24506         <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>
24507       </div>
24508       <div class="date">
24509          1st June 2010
24510       </div>
24511       <div class="body">
24512         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
24513 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
24514 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
24515 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
24516 wait.</p>
24517
24518 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
24519 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
24520 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
24521 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
24522 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
24523 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
24524
24525 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
24526 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
24527 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
24528 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
24529 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
24530 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
24531 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
24532 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
24533
24534 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
24535
24536       </div>
24537       <div class="tags">
24538
24539
24540         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>.
24541
24542
24543       </div>
24544     </div>
24545     <div class="padding"></div>
24546
24547     <div class="entry">
24548       <div class="title">
24549         <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>
24550       </div>
24551       <div class="date">
24552         27th May 2010
24553       </div>
24554       <div class="body">
24555         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
24556 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
24557 issues are known and should be solved:
24558
24559 <p><ul>
24560
24561 <li>The wicd package seen to
24562 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
24563 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
24564 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
24565 seem to be on the case.</li>
24566
24567 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
24568 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
24569 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
24570 maintainer is on the case.</li>
24571
24572 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
24573 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
24574 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
24575 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
24576 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
24577 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
24578 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
24579 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
24580
24581 </ul></p>
24582
24583 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
24584 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
24585 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
24586 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
24587
24588 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
24589 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
24590 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
24591 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
24592
24593 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
24594
24595       </div>
24596       <div class="tags">
24597
24598
24599         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>.
24600
24601
24602       </div>
24603     </div>
24604     <div class="padding"></div>
24605
24606     <div class="entry">
24607       <div class="title">
24608         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
24609       </div>
24610       <div class="date">
24611         22nd May 2010
24612       </div>
24613       <div class="body">
24614         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
24615 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
24616 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
24617 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
24618
24619 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
24620 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
24621 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
24622 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
24623 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
24624 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
24625 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
24626 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
24627 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
24628 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
24629 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
24630 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
24631 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
24632 going to work.</p>
24633
24634 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
24635 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
24636 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
24637 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
24638 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
24639 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
24640 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
24641 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
24642 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
24643 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
24644 Edu.</p>
24645
24646 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
24647 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
24648 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
24649 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
24650 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
24651 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
24652
24653 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
24654 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
24655
24656       </div>
24657       <div class="tags">
24658
24659
24660         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>.
24661
24662
24663       </div>
24664     </div>
24665     <div class="padding"></div>
24666
24667     <div class="entry">
24668       <div class="title">
24669         <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>
24670       </div>
24671       <div class="date">
24672         19th May 2010
24673       </div>
24674       <div class="body">
24675         <p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
24676 Edu finally entered the Debian archive.  Today, the new
24677 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
24678 package was accepted.  Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
24679 into unstable.  The
24680 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
24681 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
24682 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
24683 passed NEW on Monday.  In addition, the
24684 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
24685 package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
24686 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
24687
24688 <p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
24689 roaming laptops.  The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
24690 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
24691 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
24692 for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
24693 #485282</a> is implemented.  The alternative setup is to use sssd with
24694 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
24695 care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
24696
24697 <p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
24698 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
24699 problem with the server certificate.  I plan to update the Debian
24700 package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
24701 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
24702 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches.  Upstream is friendly and responsive,
24703 and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
24704
24705 <p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
24706 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
24707 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
24708 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
24709 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information.  The
24710 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
24711 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
24712 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used.  To avoid confusion
24713 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
24714 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
24715 on the home directory servers.</p>
24716
24717 <p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
24718 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
24719 is created.  Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
24720 message.  The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
24721 a bug in gdm.  Have not investigated if there is some other message
24722 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
24723
24724 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
24725 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
24726
24727       </div>
24728       <div class="tags">
24729
24730
24731         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>.
24732
24733
24734       </div>
24735     </div>
24736     <div class="padding"></div>
24737
24738     <div class="entry">
24739       <div class="title">
24740         <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>
24741       </div>
24742       <div class="date">
24743         14th May 2010
24744       </div>
24745       <div class="body">
24746         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
24747 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
24748 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
24749 expected, if I am to believe the
24750 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
24751 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
24752 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
24753 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
24754 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
24755 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
24756 version.</p>
24757
24758 More information about
24759 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
24760 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
24761 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
24762 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
24763
24764 <blockquote><pre>
24765 CONCURRENCY=none
24766 </pre></blockquote>
24767
24768 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
24769 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
24770 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
24771 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
24772
24773       </div>
24774       <div class="tags">
24775
24776
24777         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>.
24778
24779
24780       </div>
24781     </div>
24782     <div class="padding"></div>
24783
24784     <div class="entry">
24785       <div class="title">
24786         <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>
24787       </div>
24788       <div class="date">
24789         14th May 2010
24790       </div>
24791       <div class="body">
24792         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
24793 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
24794 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
24795 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
24796 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
24797 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
24798 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
24799 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
24800
24801 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
24802 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
24803 this on the collector host:</p>
24804
24805 <blockquote><pre>
24806 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
24807 </pre></blockquote>
24808
24809 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
24810 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
24811
24812 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
24813 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
24814 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
24815 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
24816 written yet.</p>
24817
24818       </div>
24819       <div class="tags">
24820
24821
24822         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>.
24823
24824
24825       </div>
24826     </div>
24827     <div class="padding"></div>
24828
24829     <div class="entry">
24830       <div class="title">
24831         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
24832       </div>
24833       <div class="date">
24834         13th May 2010
24835       </div>
24836       <div class="body">
24837         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
24838 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
24839 has been
24840 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
24841
24842 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
24843 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
24844 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
24845 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
24846 based boot system.  Tollef is
24847 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
24848 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
24849 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
24850 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
24851 at the moment do not.</p>
24852
24853 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
24854 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
24855 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
24856 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
24857 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
24858 way forward.</p>
24859
24860 <p>In the mean time, based on the
24861 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
24862 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
24863 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
24864 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
24865 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
24866 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
24867 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
24868 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
24869
24870       </div>
24871       <div class="tags">
24872
24873
24874         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>.
24875
24876
24877       </div>
24878     </div>
24879     <div class="padding"></div>
24880
24881     <div class="entry">
24882       <div class="title">
24883         <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>
24884       </div>
24885       <div class="date">
24886          6th May 2010
24887       </div>
24888       <div class="body">
24889         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
24890 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
24891 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
24892 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
24893 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
24894 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
24895 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
24896
24897 <blockquote><pre>
24898 CONCURRENCY=makefile
24899 </pre></blockquote>
24900
24901 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
24902 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
24903 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
24904 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
24905 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
24906 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
24907 make this happen.</p>
24908
24909 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
24910 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
24911 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
24912 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
24913 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
24914
24915 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
24916 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
24917 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
24918 fix the remaining issues.</p>
24919
24920 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
24921 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
24922 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
24923 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
24924
24925       </div>
24926       <div class="tags">
24927
24928
24929         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>.
24930
24931
24932       </div>
24933     </div>
24934     <div class="padding"></div>
24935
24936     <div class="entry">
24937       <div class="title">
24938         <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>
24939       </div>
24940       <div class="date">
24941          2nd May 2010
24942       </div>
24943       <div class="body">
24944         <p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
24945 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
24946 change the password on the first login attempt.</p>
24947
24948 <p>I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
24949 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account.  The account
24950 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
24951 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
24952 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.</p>
24953
24954 <p>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
24955 settings in /etc/shadow:</p>
24956
24957 <blockquote><pre>
24958 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
24959 Last password change                                    : May 02, 2010
24960 Password expires                                        : never
24961 Password inactive                                       : never
24962 Account expires                                         : never
24963 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
24964 Maximum number of days between password change          : 99999
24965 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
24966 root@tjener:~#
24967 </pre></blockquote>
24968
24969 <p>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
24970 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
24971 lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
24972 to the difference in days between that date and today.  To make it
24973 simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
24974 avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).</p>
24975
24976 <p>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
24977 intended:</p>
24978
24979 <blockquote><pre>
24980 root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
24981 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
24982 Last password change                                    : Jan 02, 1970
24983 Password expires                                        : never
24984 Password inactive                                       : never
24985 Account expires                                         : never
24986 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
24987 Maximum number of days between password change          : 10950
24988 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
24989 root@tjener:~#
24990 </pre></blockquote>
24991
24992 <p>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
24993 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
24994 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).</p>
24995
24996 <p>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
24997 sure only the user itself have the account password?</p>
24998
24999 <p>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
25000 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
25001
25002 <p>Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
25003 shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
25004 last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
25005 on the first login.  This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
25006 I did not notice this in my initial testing.  I have tested it on
25007 Squeeze, and '<tt>chage -d 0 username</tt>' do work there.  I have not
25008 tested it on Lenny yet.</p>
25009
25010 <p>Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
25011 equivalent command to expire a password is '<tt>passwd -e
25012 username</tt>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
25013 change.</p>
25014
25015       </div>
25016       <div class="tags">
25017
25018
25019         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>.
25020
25021
25022       </div>
25023     </div>
25024     <div class="padding"></div>
25025
25026     <div class="entry">
25027       <div class="title">
25028         <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>
25029       </div>
25030       <div class="date">
25031         28th April 2010
25032       </div>
25033       <div class="body">
25034         <p>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
25035 Debian Edu.  The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
25036 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
25037 and go.</p>
25038
25039 <p>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
25040 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
25041 example called Roaming Workstations.  Here are my thought on this.
25042 The setup would consist of the following:</p>
25043
25044 <ul>
25045
25046  <li>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
25047    the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
25048    the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
25049    server.  This allow the user to work also when offline.  The
25050    central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
25051    request, for example mounted via CIFS.  It could be mounted
25052    automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
25053    and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
25054    hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
25055    request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
25056    can be used to access it when needed.  Perhaps it is enough to use
25057    the fish protocol in KDE?</li>
25058
25059  <li>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
25060    authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
25061    to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
25062    to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server.  This can be done using
25063    <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
25064    or the Fedora developed
25065    <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
25066    Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
25067
25068  <li>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
25069    using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
25070    directory, using unison.</li>
25071
25072  <li>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
25073    their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
25074    the box with CUPS.  For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
25075    system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
25076    implemented.</li>
25077
25078  <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
25079    sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
25080
25081  <li>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
25082    cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
25083    local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.</li>
25084
25085 </ul>
25086
25087 <p>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
25088 the moment.  If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
25089 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze.  Some of the pieces need
25090 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
25091 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) and nslcd (or
25092 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
25093 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
25094 when disconnected from the net.  If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
25095 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.</p>
25096
25097 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
25098 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
25099
25100       </div>
25101       <div class="tags">
25102
25103
25104         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>.
25105
25106
25107       </div>
25108     </div>
25109     <div class="padding"></div>
25110
25111     <div class="entry">
25112       <div class="title">
25113         <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>
25114       </div>
25115       <div class="date">
25116         19th April 2010
25117       </div>
25118       <div class="body">
25119         <p>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
25120 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
25121 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
25122 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
25123 book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
25124 Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few
25125 restrictions on the web, for example from
25126 <a href="http://craphound.com/content/">his own site</a>. I read the
25127 epub-version from
25128 <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883">feedbooks</a> using
25129 <a href="http://www.fbreader.org/">fbreader</a> and my N810. I
25130 strongly recommend this book.</p>
25131
25132       </div>
25133       <div class="tags">
25134
25135
25136         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>.
25137
25138
25139       </div>
25140     </div>
25141     <div class="padding"></div>
25142
25143     <div class="entry">
25144       <div class="title">
25145         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html">Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</a>
25146       </div>
25147       <div class="date">
25148         14th April 2010
25149       </div>
25150       <div class="body">
25151         <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
25152 NUUG presentation</a> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
25153 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux.  Setting up a
25154 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
25155 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
25156 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
25157 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
25158 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
25159 users and cryptographic keys instead.</p>
25160
25161 <p>A challenge will be integration and administration.  Is there a
25162 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
25163 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups?  With it, the
25164 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
25165 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.</p>
25166
25167 <p>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
25168 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together.  Anyone know?</p>
25169
25170 <p>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
25171 Nagios.  I have no idea how much work that will be to implement.  We
25172 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
25173 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
25174 to work properly.</p>
25175
25176 <p>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
25177 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
25178 configuration and integration.  A natural starting point would be
25179 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
25180 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
25181 time.</p>
25182
25183 <p>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
25184 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
25185 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home.  The video show show
25186 up in a few days.</p>
25187
25188       </div>
25189       <div class="tags">
25190
25191
25192         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>.
25193
25194
25195       </div>
25196     </div>
25197     <div class="padding"></div>
25198
25199     <div class="entry">
25200       <div class="title">
25201         <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>
25202       </div>
25203       <div class="date">
25204          6th March 2010
25205       </div>
25206       <div class="body">
25207         <p>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
25208 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
25209 when the user log out.  A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
25210 package in 2004 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/230422">#230422</a>),
25211 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
25212 Today, this finally paid off.</p>
25213
25214 <p>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
25215 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
25216 been updated to use this framework.  Next on my agenda is to make sure
25217 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.</p>
25218
25219 <p>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
25220 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
25221 after a user.  With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
25222 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
25223 framework.  My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
25224 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.<p>
25225
25226       </div>
25227       <div class="tags">
25228
25229
25230         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>.
25231
25232
25233       </div>
25234     </div>
25235     <div class="padding"></div>
25236
25237     <div class="entry">
25238       <div class="title">
25239         <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>
25240       </div>
25241       <div class="date">
25242         11th February 2010
25243       </div>
25244       <div class="body">
25245         <p>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
25246 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> was finally
25247 shipped.  This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
25248 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up.  Work on the first
25249 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
25250 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
25251 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.</p>
25252
25253 <p>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?</p>
25254
25255 <p>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
25256 next major release, based on Squeeze.  We will try to get as many of
25257 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
25258 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.</p>
25259
25260       </div>
25261       <div class="tags">
25262
25263
25264         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>.
25265
25266
25267       </div>
25268     </div>
25269     <div class="padding"></div>
25270
25271     <div class="entry">
25272       <div class="title">
25273         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html">Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</a>
25274       </div>
25275       <div class="date">
25276         27th January 2010
25277       </div>
25278       <div class="body">
25279         <p>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
25280 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
25281 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
25282 Nagios.  The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
25283 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
25284 further.</p>
25285
25286 <p>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
25287 configured as a Munin and Nagios server.  In addition, it is
25288 configured to be a server for the
25289 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">SiteSummary
25290 system</a> I have written for use in Debian Edu.  The SiteSummary
25291 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
25292 work.  In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
25293 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
25294 computer submitting information to this collector.  This allow for
25295 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
25296 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
25297 packages got etc.  This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
25298 and Nagios configuration.</p>
25299
25300 <p>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
25301 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
25302 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
25303 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.</p>
25304
25305 <p>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
25306 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
25307 services detected).  In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
25308 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
25309 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
25310 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
25311 the machine.</p>
25312
25313 <p>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
25314 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
25315 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
25316 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.</p>
25317
25318 <p>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
25319 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP.  The system
25320 administrator need to run "<tt>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
25321 nagiosadmin</tt>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
25322 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages.  After that,
25323 everything is taken care of.</p>
25324
25325       </div>
25326       <div class="tags">
25327
25328
25329         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>.
25330
25331
25332       </div>
25333     </div>
25334     <div class="padding"></div>
25335
25336     <div class="entry">
25337       <div class="title">
25338         <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>
25339       </div>
25340       <div class="date">
25341         12th August 2009
25342       </div>
25343       <div class="body">
25344         <p>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
25345 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
25346 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage.  I searched using
25347 'filetype:odt' and equvalent terms, and got these results:</P>
25348
25349 <table>
25350 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
25351 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:282000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
25352 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:75600</td> <td>pptx:183000</td></tr>
25353 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:145000</td></tr>
25354 </table>
25355
25356 <p>Next, I added a 'site:no' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
25357 got these numbers:</p>
25358
25359 <table>
25360 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
25361 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480 </td> <td>docx:4460</td></tr>
25362 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:299   </td> <td>pptx:741</td></tr>
25363 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:187       </td> <td>xlsx:372</td></tr>
25364 </table>
25365
25366 <p>I wonder how these numbers change over time.</p>
25367
25368 <p>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
25369 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
25370 they are conduced in another country.  Because of this, I did the same
25371 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
25372 search done from a machine here in Norway.</p>
25373
25374
25375 <table>
25376 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
25377 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:129000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
25378 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:44200</td> <td>pptx:93900</td></tr>
25379 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:82400</td></tr>
25380 </table>
25381
25382 <p>And with 'site:no':
25383
25384 <table>
25385 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
25386 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480</td> <td>docx:3410</td></tr>
25387 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:175</td> <td>pptx:604</td></tr>
25388 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:186       </td> <td>xlsx:296</td></tr>
25389 </table>
25390
25391 <p>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
25392 numbers.</p>
25393
25394       </div>
25395       <div class="tags">
25396
25397
25398         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>.
25399
25400
25401       </div>
25402     </div>
25403     <div class="padding"></div>
25404
25405     <div class="entry">
25406       <div class="title">
25407         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html">ISO still hope to fix OOXML</a>
25408       </div>
25409       <div class="date">
25410          8th August 2009
25411       </div>
25412       <div class="body">
25413         <p>According to <a
25414 href="http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html">a
25415 blog post from Torsten Werner</a>, the current defect report for ISO
25416 29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages.  His interesting point is that the
25417 defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
25418 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
25419 can be fixed in ISO.  Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
25420 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
25421 close to solving the problems.  I was part of the Norwegian committee
25422 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
25423 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.</p>
25424
25425 <p>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
25426 with the future ahead of it.  We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
25427 seminar this autumn.</p>
25428
25429       </div>
25430       <div class="tags">
25431
25432
25433         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>.
25434
25435
25436       </div>
25437     </div>
25438     <div class="padding"></div>
25439
25440     <div class="entry">
25441       <div class="title">
25442         <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>
25443       </div>
25444       <div class="date">
25445         27th July 2009
25446       </div>
25447       <div class="body">
25448         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
25449 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
25450 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
25451 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
25452 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
25453 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
25454 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
25455
25456 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
25457 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
25458 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
25459
25460       </div>
25461       <div class="tags">
25462
25463
25464         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>.
25465
25466
25467       </div>
25468     </div>
25469     <div class="padding"></div>
25470
25471     <div class="entry">
25472       <div class="title">
25473         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
25474       </div>
25475       <div class="date">
25476         22nd July 2009
25477       </div>
25478       <div class="body">
25479         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
25480 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
25481 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
25482 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
25483 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
25484 the package up to date.</p>
25485
25486 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
25487 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
25488 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
25489 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
25490 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
25491 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
25492 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
25493 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
25494 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
25495 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
25496 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
25497 working on the future release.</p>
25498
25499 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
25500 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
25501
25502       </div>
25503       <div class="tags">
25504
25505
25506         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>.
25507
25508
25509       </div>
25510     </div>
25511     <div class="padding"></div>
25512
25513     <div class="entry">
25514       <div class="title">
25515         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
25516       </div>
25517       <div class="date">
25518         24th June 2009
25519       </div>
25520       <div class="body">
25521         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
25522 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
25523 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
25524 funded
25525 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
25526 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
25527 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
25528 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
25529 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
25530 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
25531
25532 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
25533 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
25534 boot:</p>
25535
25536 <ul>
25537
25538 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
25539
25540 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
25541    clock is in UTC.</li>
25542
25543 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
25544    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
25545    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
25546
25547 </ul>
25548
25549 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
25550 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
25551 Villegas</a>.
25552
25553 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
25554 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
25555 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
25556 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
25557 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
25558 using this.</p>
25559
25560 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
25561 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
25562 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
25563 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
25564 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
25565 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
25566 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
25567
25568       </div>
25569       <div class="tags">
25570
25571
25572         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>.
25573
25574
25575       </div>
25576     </div>
25577     <div class="padding"></div>
25578
25579     <div class="entry">
25580       <div class="title">
25581         <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>
25582       </div>
25583       <div class="date">
25584          2nd May 2009
25585       </div>
25586       <div class="body">
25587         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
25588 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
25589 do not yet know them.</p>
25590
25591 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
25592 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
25593 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
25594 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
25595 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
25596 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
25597 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
25598 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
25599 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
25600 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
25601 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
25602
25603 <p>The second one is
25604 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
25605 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
25606 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
25607 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
25608 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
25609 and the company behind it is running
25610 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
25611 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
25612 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
25613 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
25614 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
25615 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
25616 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
25617 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
25618
25619 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
25620 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
25621 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
25622 surrounded by today.</p>
25623
25624       </div>
25625       <div class="tags">
25626
25627
25628         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>.
25629
25630
25631       </div>
25632     </div>
25633     <div class="padding"></div>
25634
25635     <div class="entry">
25636       <div class="title">
25637         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html">No patch is not better than a useless patch</a>
25638       </div>
25639       <div class="date">
25640         28th April 2009
25641       </div>
25642       <div class="body">
25643         <p>Julien Blache
25644 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
25645 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
25646 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
25647 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
25648 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
25649 properties.</p>
25650
25651       </div>
25652       <div class="tags">
25653
25654
25655         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>.
25656
25657
25658       </div>
25659     </div>
25660     <div class="padding"></div>
25661
25662     <div class="entry">
25663       <div class="title">
25664         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html">Recording video from cron using VLC</a>
25665       </div>
25666       <div class="date">
25667          5th April 2009
25668       </div>
25669       <div class="body">
25670         <p>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
25671 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net.  The
25672 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
25673 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
25674 vlc.  I finally found a way to do it today.  I spent an hour or so
25675 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation.  The
25676 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
25677 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:</p>
25678
25679 <blockquote><pre>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
25680 SAVEFILE=rms.ogg
25681 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
25682   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
25683   --intf=dummy</pre></blockquote>
25684
25685 <p>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
25686 duplicating the output stream to "nodisplay" and the file, using the
25687 dummy interface.  The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
25688 sure no X interface is needed.</p>
25689
25690 <p>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
25691 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
25692 the vlc process with SIGTERM.  Here is a complete script
25693 <tt>vlc-record</tt> to use from <tt>at</tt> or <tt>cron</tt>:</p>
25694
25695 <blockquote><pre>#!/bin/sh
25696 set -e
25697 URL="$1"
25698 SAVEFILE="$2"
25699 DURATION="$3"
25700 DISPLAY= vlc -q "$URL" \
25701   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
25702   --intf=dummy < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 &
25703 pid=$!
25704 sleep $DURATION
25705 kill $pid
25706 wait $pid</pre></blockquote>
25707
25708       </div>
25709       <div class="tags">
25710
25711
25712         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>.
25713
25714
25715       </div>
25716     </div>
25717     <div class="padding"></div>
25718
25719     <div class="entry">
25720       <div class="title">
25721         <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>
25722       </div>
25723       <div class="date">
25724         30th March 2009
25725       </div>
25726       <div class="body">
25727         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
25728 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
25729 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
25730 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
25731 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
25732 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
25733 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
25734 application.</p>
25735
25736 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
25737 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
25738 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
25739 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
25740 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
25741 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
25742 blocked from doing so.</p>
25743
25744 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
25745 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
25746 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
25747 requirements change.</p>
25748
25749 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
25750 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
25751 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
25752
25753       </div>
25754       <div class="tags">
25755
25756
25757         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>.
25758
25759
25760       </div>
25761     </div>
25762     <div class="padding"></div>
25763
25764     <div class="entry">
25765       <div class="title">
25766         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
25767       </div>
25768       <div class="date">
25769         29th March 2009
25770       </div>
25771       <div class="body">
25772         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
25773 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
25774 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
25775 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
25776 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
25777 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
25778 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
25779 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
25780 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
25781 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
25782 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
25783 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
25784 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
25785 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
25786 now. :)</p>
25787
25788       </div>
25789       <div class="tags">
25790
25791
25792         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>.
25793
25794
25795       </div>
25796     </div>
25797     <div class="padding"></div>
25798
25799     <div class="entry">
25800       <div class="title">
25801         <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>
25802       </div>
25803       <div class="date">
25804         29th March 2009
25805       </div>
25806       <div class="body">
25807         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
25808 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
25809 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
25810 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
25811 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
25812 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
25813
25814 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
25815 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
25816 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
25817 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
25818 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
25819 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
25820 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
25821 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
25822 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
25823 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
25824 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
25825 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
25826 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
25827
25828 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
25829 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
25830 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
25831 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
25832
25833 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
25834 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
25835
25836 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
25837 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
25838 new IETF work group?</p>
25839
25840       </div>
25841       <div class="tags">
25842
25843
25844         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>.
25845
25846
25847       </div>
25848     </div>
25849     <div class="padding"></div>
25850
25851     <div class="entry">
25852       <div class="title">
25853         <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>
25854       </div>
25855       <div class="date">
25856         28th February 2009
25857       </div>
25858       <div class="body">
25859         <p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
25860 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
25861 contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
25862 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
25863 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
25864 each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
25865 status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
25866 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
25867 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
25868 machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
25869 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
25870 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
25871 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
25872 for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
25873 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
25874 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
25875 The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
25876 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
25877 them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
25878 using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
25879 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
25880 services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
25881 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
25882 them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
25883 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
25884 machine.</p>
25885
25886 <p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
25887 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
25888 Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
25889 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
25890 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
25891 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
25892 introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:</p>
25893
25894 <pre>
25895 use LWP::Simple;
25896 use POSIX;
25897 use WWW::Mechanize;
25898 use Date::Parse;
25899 [...]
25900 sub get_support_info {
25901     my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
25902     my $str;
25903
25904     if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
25905         # fetch website from Dell support
25906         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";
25907         my $webpage = get($url);
25908         return undef unless ($webpage);
25909
25910         my $daysleft = -1;
25911         my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
25912         foreach my $line (@lines) {
25913             next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
25914             $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
25915             $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
25916
25917             my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
25918             @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
25919             my $lastend = "";
25920             while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
25921                 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
25922
25923                 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
25924                                             localtime(str2time($startstr)));
25925                 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
25926                                           localtime(str2time($endstr)));
25927                 $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
25928                 @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
25929                 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
25930             }
25931             my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
25932             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
25933                 if ($lastend lt $today);
25934         }
25935     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
25936         my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
25937         my $url =
25938             'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
25939         $mech->get($url);
25940         my $fields = {
25941             'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
25942             'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
25943             'country' => 'NO',
25944             'productNumber' => $productnumber,
25945             'serialNumber1' => $serial,
25946         };
25947         $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
25948                             fields      => $fields );
25949         # Next step is screen scraping
25950         my $content = $mech->content();
25951
25952         $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
25953         $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
25954         $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
25955         $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
25956
25957         my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
25958
25959         while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
25960             my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
25961                 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
25962             $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
25963             my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
25964                                         localtime(str2time($startstr)));
25965             my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
25966                                       localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
25967
25968             $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
25969
25970             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
25971                 if ($end lt $today);
25972         }
25973     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
25974         # This code ignore extended support contracts.
25975         my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
25976         if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
25977             my $content =
25978                 get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
25979             if ($content) {
25980                 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
25981                 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
25982                 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
25983                 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
25984
25985                 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
25986                 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
25987
25988                 $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
25989
25990                 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
25991                 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
25992                     if ($end lt $today);
25993             }
25994         }
25995     }
25996     return $str;
25997 }
25998 </pre>
25999
26000 <p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
26001 serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
26002 from dmidecode.</p>
26003
26004 <pre>
26005 print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
26006                        "447707-B21");
26007 print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
26008 print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
26009                        "1234567");
26010 </pre>
26011
26012 <p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
26013 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
26014
26015 <p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
26016 contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
26017 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
26018 do so.</p>
26019
26020       </div>
26021       <div class="tags">
26022
26023
26024         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>.
26025
26026
26027       </div>
26028     </div>
26029     <div class="padding"></div>
26030
26031     <div class="entry">
26032       <div class="title">
26033         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html">Using bar codes at a computing center</a>
26034       </div>
26035       <div class="date">
26036         20th February 2009
26037       </div>
26038       <div class="body">
26039         <p>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
26040 in our computing center.  This give us a challenge in tracking the
26041 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
26042 removed.  Some times the location register is not updated when a
26043 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
26044 the "missing" computer.</p>
26045
26046 <p>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
26047 <a href="http://www.libdmtx.org/">libdmtx</a> to write and read bar
26048 code blocks as defined in the
26049 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix">The Data Matrix
26050 Standard</a>.  This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
26051 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
26052 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture.  The bar code standard
26053 allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag.  There is another project
26054 with <a href="http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/">a bar code
26055 writer written in postscript</a> capable of creating such bar codes,
26056 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
26057 codes.</p>
26058
26059 <p>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
26060 machines in our computing center.  If both racks and computers are
26061 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
26062 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
26063 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
26064 locations, and can detect movements and removals.</p>
26065
26066 <p>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
26067 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names.  Next, I
26068 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
26069 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read.  This worked
26070 fairly well.  If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
26071 side, all tags in the image could be read.  Because of limited space
26072 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
26073 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
26074 about half the rack.  I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
26075 to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.</p>
26076
26077 <p>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
26078 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
26079 easier automatic tracking of computers.</p>
26080
26081       </div>
26082       <div class="tags">
26083
26084
26085         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>.
26086
26087
26088       </div>
26089     </div>
26090     <div class="padding"></div>
26091
26092     <div class="entry">
26093       <div class="title">
26094         <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>
26095       </div>
26096       <div class="date">
26097         17th January 2009
26098       </div>
26099       <div class="body">
26100         <p>As part of the work we do in <a href="http://www.nuug.no">NUUG</a>
26101 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
26102 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
26103 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
26104 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
26105 will become easier when the &lt;video&gt; tag is implemented in all
26106 browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
26107 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
26108 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
26109 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
26110 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
26111 &lt;video&gt; tag, the &lt;object&gt; tag, the &lt;embed&gt; tag and
26112 the &lt;applet&gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
26113 finding the best options is a major challenge.</p>
26114
26115 <p>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from <a
26116 href="http://labs.opera.com">labs.opera.com</a>, to see how it handled
26117 a &lt;video&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
26118 I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
26119 from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
26120 definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
26121 instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
26122 of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
26123 for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
26124 is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
26125 download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
26126 discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
26127 to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
26128 autoplay="true" did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
26129 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
26130 &lt;video&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
26131 playing when the download is done.</p>
26132
26133 <p>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
26134 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/">available
26135 from the nuug site</a>.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
26136 too.</p>
26137
26138 <p>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
26139 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
26140 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
26141 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)</p>
26142
26143       </div>
26144       <div class="tags">
26145
26146
26147         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
26148
26149
26150       </div>
26151     </div>
26152     <div class="padding"></div>
26153
26154     <div class="entry">
26155       <div class="title">
26156         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html">Software video mixer on a USB stick</a>
26157       </div>
26158       <div class="date">
26159         28th December 2008
26160       </div>
26161       <div class="body">
26162         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> is
26163 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
26164 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
26165 directly with the video stream.  For this, we use the
26166 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/">dvswitch</a> package from
26167 the Debian video team.  As this require quite one computer per video
26168 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
26169 borrow laptops.  And to avoid having to install extra software on
26170 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
26171 bootable USB stick.  The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
26172 source, sink and mixer applications and
26173 <a href="http://www.kinodv.org/">dvgrab</a>.  To allow this setup to
26174 work without any configuration, I've patched dvswitch to use
26175 <a href="http://www.avahi.org/">avahi</a> to connect the various parts
26176 together.  And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
26177 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
26178 with USB sources.  We have not yet tested this setup in a production
26179 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
26180 video mixer in a very short time frame.  We will need it for
26181 <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go Open 2009</a>.</p>
26182
26183 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz">The
26184 USB image</a> is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
26185 larger stick as well.</p>
26186
26187       </div>
26188       <div class="tags">
26189
26190
26191         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>.
26192
26193
26194       </div>
26195     </div>
26196     <div class="padding"></div>
26197
26198     <div class="entry">
26199       <div class="title">
26200         <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>
26201       </div>
26202       <div class="date">
26203          7th December 2008
26204       </div>
26205       <div class="body">
26206         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
26207 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
26208 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
26209 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
26210 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
26211 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
26212 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
26213 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
26214
26215 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
26216 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
26217 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
26218 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
26219 of these cards.</p>
26220
26221       </div>
26222       <div class="tags">
26223
26224
26225         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>.
26226
26227
26228       </div>
26229     </div>
26230     <div class="padding"></div>
26231
26232     <div class="entry">
26233       <div class="title">
26234         <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>
26235       </div>
26236       <div class="date">
26237         25th November 2008
26238       </div>
26239       <div class="body">
26240         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
26241 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
26242 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
26243 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
26244 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
26245 notes are available on
26246 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
26247 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
26248 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
26249 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
26250 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
26251 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
26252 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
26253 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
26254 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
26255
26256 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
26257 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
26258
26259       </div>
26260       <div class="tags">
26261
26262
26263         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>.
26264
26265
26266       </div>
26267     </div>
26268     <div class="padding"></div>
26269
26270     <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>
26271     <div id="sidebar">
26272
26273
26274
26275 <h2>Archive</h2>
26276 <ul>
26277
26278 <li>2016
26279 <ul>
26280
26281 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/01/">January (3)</a></li>
26282
26283 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/02/">February (2)</a></li>
26284
26285 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/03/">March (3)</a></li>
26286
26287 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/04/">April (8)</a></li>
26288
26289 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/05/">May (8)</a></li>
26290
26291 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/06/">June (2)</a></li>
26292
26293 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/07/">July (2)</a></li>
26294
26295 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/08/">August (3)</a></li>
26296
26297 </ul></li>
26298
26299 <li>2015
26300 <ul>
26301
26302 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
26303
26304 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
26305
26306 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
26307
26308 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
26309
26310 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (3)</a></li>
26311
26312 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/06/">June (4)</a></li>
26313
26314 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/07/">July (6)</a></li>
26315
26316 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/08/">August (2)</a></li>
26317
26318 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/09/">September (2)</a></li>
26319
26320 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/10/">October (9)</a></li>
26321
26322 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/11/">November (6)</a></li>
26323
26324 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/12/">December (3)</a></li>
26325
26326 </ul></li>
26327
26328 <li>2014
26329 <ul>
26330
26331 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
26332
26333 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
26334
26335 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
26336
26337 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
26338
26339 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
26340
26341 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
26342
26343 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
26344
26345 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
26346
26347 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
26348
26349 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
26350
26351 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
26352
26353 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
26354
26355 </ul></li>
26356
26357 <li>2013
26358 <ul>
26359
26360 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
26361
26362 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
26363
26364 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
26365
26366 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
26367
26368 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
26369
26370 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
26371
26372 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
26373
26374 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
26375
26376 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
26377
26378 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
26379
26380 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
26381
26382 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
26383
26384 </ul></li>
26385
26386 <li>2012
26387 <ul>
26388
26389 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
26390
26391 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
26392
26393 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
26394
26395 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
26396
26397 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
26398
26399 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
26400
26401 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
26402
26403 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
26404
26405 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
26406
26407 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
26408
26409 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
26410
26411 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
26412
26413 </ul></li>
26414
26415 <li>2011
26416 <ul>
26417
26418 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
26419
26420 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
26421
26422 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
26423
26424 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
26425
26426 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
26427
26428 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
26429
26430 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
26431
26432 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
26433
26434 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
26435
26436 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
26437
26438 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
26439
26440 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
26441
26442 </ul></li>
26443
26444 <li>2010
26445 <ul>
26446
26447 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
26448
26449 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
26450
26451 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
26452
26453 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
26454
26455 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
26456
26457 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
26458
26459 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
26460
26461 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
26462
26463 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
26464
26465 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
26466
26467 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
26468
26469 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
26470
26471 </ul></li>
26472
26473 <li>2009
26474 <ul>
26475
26476 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
26477
26478 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
26479
26480 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
26481
26482 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
26483
26484 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
26485
26486 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
26487
26488 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
26489
26490 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
26491
26492 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
26493
26494 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
26495
26496 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
26497
26498 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
26499
26500 </ul></li>
26501
26502 <li>2008
26503 <ul>
26504
26505 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
26506
26507 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
26508
26509 </ul></li>
26510
26511 </ul>
26512
26513
26514
26515 <h2>Tags</h2>
26516 <ul>
26517
26518  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (13)</a></li>
26519
26520  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
26521
26522  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
26523
26524  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
26525
26526  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (9)</a></li>
26527
26528  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (16)</a></li>
26529
26530  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
26531
26532  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
26533
26534  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (133)</a></li>
26535
26536  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (157)</a></li>
26537
26538  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
26539
26540  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (15)</a></li>
26541
26542  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (23)</a></li>
26543
26544  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
26545
26546  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (325)</a></li>
26547
26548  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
26549
26550  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (12)</a></li>
26551
26552  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (28)</a></li>
26553
26554  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
26555
26556  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (18)</a></li>
26557
26558  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264 (20)</a></li>
26559
26560  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (42)</a></li>
26561
26562  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (12)</a></li>
26563
26564  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (19)</a></li>
26565
26566  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
26567
26568  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
26569
26570  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
26571
26572  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
26573
26574  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
26575
26576  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (39)</a></li>
26577
26578  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software (7)</a></li>
26579
26580  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (276)</a></li>
26581
26582  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (182)</a></li>
26583
26584  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (26)</a></li>
26585
26586  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
26587
26588  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (61)</a></li>
26589
26590  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (92)</a></li>
26591
26592  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (1)</a></li>
26593
26594  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
26595
26596  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
26597
26598  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
26599
26600  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (9)</a></li>
26601
26602  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
26603
26604  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (4)</a></li>
26605
26606  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
26607
26608  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (48)</a></li>
26609
26610  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
26611
26612  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (5)</a></li>
26613
26614  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (49)</a></li>
26615
26616  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (4)</a></li>
26617
26618  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (10)</a></li>
26619
26620  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (37)</a></li>
26621
26622  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (2)</a></li>
26623
26624  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
26625
26626  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (8)</a></li>
26627
26628  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (59)</a></li>
26629
26630  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
26631
26632  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (38)</a></li>
26633
26634 </ul>
26635
26636
26637     </div>
26638     <p style="text-align: right">
26639  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
26640 </p>
26641
26642   </body>
26643 </html>